Questions about mini movie icons.
Program: Paintshop Pro 9 and Animation Shop 3
I'm going to try and be as specific and clear as possible so as not to cause confusion.
I know how to make animated icons (thanks to this community), and I know that the Optimization Wizard helps lower the size of my icon but I can never have more than 8 frames in my animation because then it becomes too large for livejournal. Here are my questions about reducing the size:
1. Does adding textures, coloring the image, text ect. add to the size of the animation? Would it be better just to leave the image in it's original color versus adding color layers, curves ect?
2. Would it minimize the size of the overall animation if I saved each individual frame as a .png, .jpeg, and/or .gif and then used the Animation Wizard to make my icon instead of just using Copy Merged (ctrl + shift + C) on Paintshop and then Pasting into selected frame (ctrl + E) on Animation Shop?
3. Am I putting in too many unnecessary frames to make the icon (refer to my icon below the cut)?
4. Or is each animation program different, does Image Ready have features that Animation Shop doesn't?
What am I doing (if anything) that's making my animations too large?
I'm going to try and be as specific and clear as possible so as not to cause confusion.
I know how to make animated icons (thanks to this community), and I know that the Optimization Wizard helps lower the size of my icon but I can never have more than 8 frames in my animation because then it becomes too large for livejournal. Here are my questions about reducing the size:
1. Does adding textures, coloring the image, text ect. add to the size of the animation? Would it be better just to leave the image in it's original color versus adding color layers, curves ect?
2. Would it minimize the size of the overall animation if I saved each individual frame as a .png, .jpeg, and/or .gif and then used the Animation Wizard to make my icon instead of just using Copy Merged (ctrl + shift + C) on Paintshop and then Pasting into selected frame (ctrl + E) on Animation Shop?
3. Am I putting in too many unnecessary frames to make the icon (refer to my icon below the cut)?
4. Or is each animation program different, does Image Ready have features that Animation Shop doesn't?
Here are some examples of other people's animated icons:
By
hurtyesterday
This icon has 16 frames and I believe it's been throught the Optimization Wizard.
By
obsessive_art
This icon has a texture and 15 frames and probably has been optimized as well.
And here's one I whipped up real quick:
Aside from the text, I didn't alter the image at all. I pasted each frame on top of the previous in Paint Shop and just used Copy Merged with each frame and then pasted it on a new file on Animation Shop. I optimized it to 156 colors yet it still came out to 72 Kb.
Hopefully I was specific enough, if not, please let me know.
By
hurtyesterday This icon has 16 frames and I believe it's been throught the Optimization Wizard.
By
obsessive_artThis icon has a texture and 15 frames and probably has been optimized as well.
And here's one I whipped up real quick:
Aside from the text, I didn't alter the image at all. I pasted each frame on top of the previous in Paint Shop and just used Copy Merged with each frame and then pasted it on a new file on Animation Shop. I optimized it to 156 colors yet it still came out to 72 Kb.
Hopefully I was specific enough, if not, please let me know.
What am I doing (if anything) that's making my animations too large?