Please be kind...I'm a total newbie at this.
I was just experimenting with ImageReady, and I wanted to make an animated avatar for this forum. This means the avatar has to be less than 75 x 75 pixels, and less than 19 kb. And I'm starting with little prior knowledge of ImageReady, though I do know its other half (Photoshop).
I began with a Quicktime movie, exported it as a JPEG image sequence, and imported it to ImageReady as a folder.
My first problem was that, with a ten-second video, I ended up with 300 frames. My first animation using all frames came out, unsurprisingly, at about 650 kb.
The first thing I did was reduce the number of colors to 6. It actually looks pretty good at that, too. (I have dithering off, and I'm using adaptive color.)
Even at that, I was still hovering around 225 kb as a file size. So I started throwing out similar frames. This has gotten me as low as about 36 kb...but I'm stuck there. Because there are fewer frames, the animation already runs pretty fast...but it still looks acceptable.
I did try the "Optimize to file size..." option, but when I set that to 19 kb, my anim comes out terrible, with about two colors.
So please tell this poor novice...have I hit the wall? Am I trying to make an animation out of something that's just too complicated to get that small?
Original QT file
my gif animation
I was just experimenting with ImageReady, and I wanted to make an animated avatar for this forum. This means the avatar has to be less than 75 x 75 pixels, and less than 19 kb. And I'm starting with little prior knowledge of ImageReady, though I do know its other half (Photoshop).
I began with a Quicktime movie, exported it as a JPEG image sequence, and imported it to ImageReady as a folder.
My first problem was that, with a ten-second video, I ended up with 300 frames. My first animation using all frames came out, unsurprisingly, at about 650 kb.
The first thing I did was reduce the number of colors to 6. It actually looks pretty good at that, too. (I have dithering off, and I'm using adaptive color.)
Even at that, I was still hovering around 225 kb as a file size. So I started throwing out similar frames. This has gotten me as low as about 36 kb...but I'm stuck there. Because there are fewer frames, the animation already runs pretty fast...but it still looks acceptable.
I did try the "Optimize to file size..." option, but when I set that to 19 kb, my anim comes out terrible, with about two colors.
So please tell this poor novice...have I hit the wall? Am I trying to make an animation out of something that's just too complicated to get that small?
Original QT file
my gif animation
