Tower Of Druaga & Making Your Animated Gifs Smaller

Kabitzin on March 13, 2009 · in Tower of Druaga 2

Beware, large files ahead.

So I was reading Zyl’s posts about his first and second attempt at making animated gifs, and I noticed the huge file sizes. Even though he had re-sized the image to 248 x 140, the first gif was almost 1.9 MB and the second was a whopping 3.5 MB. Even my own attempts, with painful cuts to the number of colors resulted in very large file sizes. Take this heart-warming scene from Tower of Druaga 10, for example:

A picture is worth a thousand words

This scene is cute (also available in 300 x 168 and 125 x 125), but it’s huge. At nearly 4.4 MB, it’s not the sort of image you want bogging down your webpage. BTW, if you like this image, please download it rather than hotlinking. I could reduce the colors even more, but the image quickly begins to look like crap. However, what if there was a way to get my point across without reducing colors?

But sometimes you only need two words: 'Do me!'

It’s amazing how much space you can save by cutting out the unimportant frames! And don’t listen to the haters that say you are “taking things out of context;” they’re just jealous that your sweet animations load way faster than theirs do! Anyway, this is for all those readers who were requesting continuously looping gifs (also in 300 x 168 and 125 x 125). It’s tricky to pick the right frames, and if you don’t cut out the really jerky frames the animation tends to look spastic. I managed to get the second one pretty smooth, and I like that it looks like Melt is groping an imaginary boob. Best of all, it’s only 0.8 MB!

Tagged as: Omake

This post was written by...

Kabitzin – who has written 1971 posts on Sea Slugs! Anime Blog.

One of the founders of Sea Slugs, I handle most of the blog admin tasks while wearing my I AM BOSS shirt. I like my action series well choreographed, and my romance series extra trashy. I also have a soft spot for puns.