Quake3World

I just created a 91 frame animated gif but the frame rate is running much slower than in the preview. I took a youtube video, converted it to avi, cropped the section I wanted, loaded it into GIF Movie Gear, took out the frames I didn't want and then watched an animated preview and everything was good. I saved as an animated gif, but it plays much slower on my pc than the preview speed. The speed is set to 3/100 of a second per frame. Why would it play so slow, yet be fine in the preview box and how can I fix it? If I load the gif that I saved back into the program, it runs at full speed again.

browser inefficiency? I don't know

Wel not browser inefficiency because this happens when I run the gif directly from my hard drive. And yes, it also runs slow in a browser. It's almost like the gif is running in slow motion. Almost.

trying to get your nose to wiggle i see

Right, I wrote to the people that make the program and got this reply. I also linked them to my gif.


"Unfortunately you've hit a limitation of the browser with its handling of animation playback. The rule of thumb used to be that a browser would not handle anything faster than ~10/100th second delays. With this particular animation, Internet Explorer is getting even more choked up than that. I also opened your animation with FireFox 2, and (this is new to me), it played at pretty much full speed. So going forward, it looks like the speed limitation is limited to IE.

The next question is: what can you do about it? Unfortunately not much. You can try making your animation thinner (ie less frames; you can use Animation>Thin to do this automatically) with longer delays between frames. You can try making the frame size smaller, but you've already gone about as small as you probably want to go with this one. You can curse the browser makers for not focusing more energy on optimization animation playback.

I wish I had a better answer for you...

Sincerely, "

He also told me that the default picture viewer on my pc uses the underlying IE display engine to show animations.

So I've thinned some animations and improved it but it's not that great. If these are the limitations, how the hell do others get such smooth gifs with all the frames they need?

When I switched to FF2, I noticed GIFs were much faster and smoother than in IE6 or 7.

Make the jump

browser render engine inefficiency then. Shoot me a pm so you can send me a mail or something with all the original fullsize images you want to include before you cropped them. I'll try to make it work.

Thanks guys. Yep, FF is meant to be faster with gif animations, I'm gonna make the jump! However, other people with IE would presumably only see my gifs at the slower speed. Anyway, I've linked you guys to 2 gifs and the original avi that I took them from. The idea is that I wanted to capture this drummers funny arm movements. In the first gif called 'dom.gif' it's 91 frames, but runs too slow for me and doesn't look funny. In the second gif called 'dom2.gif' I reduced it to 13 frames. It runs at a good speed similar to the original avi, but the lack of frames make it jerky. So that's what I'm up against.

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/merlin.five/dom.avi
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/merlin.five/dom.gif ( 91 frames)
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/merlin.five/dom2.gif ( 13 frames )



Here's another one I'm quite happy with though
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/merlin.five/dommy2.gif

DRuM wrote:However, other people with IE would presumably only see my gifs at the slower speed.

Fuck 'em