Avatar Tutorial Requested! LOL

[Arkamedies]

Okay folks, it says plain as day in the GD Avatars The next generation post that if we want help learning how to make these babies, come here....

Well here is my problem... I made one... fairly simple too... but it came out 933,189 bytes.. which is a bad thing... what is everyone using to compress and make the animated avatars?

I have GIF Construction Set Professional... but it always formats them so they look REALLY grainy..

Advice please?

[RedDeathDrinker]

First of all. Compressing avatars down from that size, you WILL lose something. Either picture quality (colour depth or pixel quantity) or number of frames. Normally both.

I start by removing every second frame (sometimes, and in your case, would remove 2, keep 1, remove 2, keep 1 etc....). That would give you around 350Kb filesize. Next lengthen the time the frame is in view (so if it was originally .1seconds, and you've halved the number of frames, double the time to .2 seconds.....)

Then reduce the colour depth. GIF Animator 5 starts at 256 colours, I can reduce them to 128, 64, 32 or 16, or any number in between. Generally, halve the number of colours, halve the filesize. By the end of this, you should be around 200Kb.

The final function Ulead GIF Animator 5 has is a "lossy" command in it's optimisation window. Basically, it will lose information about the GIF and reduce the filesize........that's when it gets grainy......

Anything I've missed?

[Arkamedies]

Gotta run, but wanted to say thanks! Is it possible that you could post a link to the site for GA 5? If there is one. I am just guessing that they have a trial version?