On 8/20/2011 5:16 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
Are GIFs always so low on colors?
Yes. GIF is limited to a 256-color palette. It's a hard technical
limit of the format, and was one of the driving forces behind the PNG
development effort.
Animation makes it worse because all the frames share a single palette.
This is why the first frame has green casts in the shadows even
though, in the renders, frame 0 has no green: there's a fair bit of
green in the overall animation, so the color quantization algorithm
included some in the global palette, and that then happened to be the
closest color when quantizing this particular frame's shadows.
I used ffmpeg to create that GIF animation, but that really isn't its
forté. A lot of programmer brain power got thrown at the problem of
improving GIF animation back in the bad old Web 1.0 days, before PNG and
Flash took over the world. Photoshop does a lot better:
http://etr-usa.com/cygwin/logo/from-box/animation2.gif
The color casts are gone, the dithering is gone, and the frame rate is
fixed. Also, I went ahead and applied the background masks, which as
predicted made the animation a lot smaller.
animation2.gif is about 1/6 the size of animation.gif, but that's still
41% bigger than the MPEG-2 version and twice as big as the WMV7. I
think Photoshop's given us as much space savings and made as good a use
of the limited box of crayons as we can reasonably hope for.
Given that, I'd still prefer that someone decide to take on the
DirectShow challenge. I don't think it would be much harder than
getting a GIF animation to show in setup.exe using only the Windows API;
I think you'd have to embed IE, which is also a COMmy mess.
are they always running in a (much too fast) loop?
No, that's just a bug in the program I used to create it. The new
version linked above fixes this.
Btw., I asked our legal dept about licensing implications due to using
derived art from the DAZ models.
Thank you!
