mini-movies in an icon - I give up.

[tzikeh]

Over the years, I've tried to make mini-movie icons by trial and error--see this post's icon for an example--and they always come out with very choppy movement. The movie plays just fine in QT or VLC, but I get it into Photoshop CS4's animation window and it turns into my icon of El, up there, or this icon of Wilson:



Or the like.

I'm absolutely at my wit's end trying to figure this out for myself. I've looked through endless icon tutorials about how to make mini-movie icons, but none of them ever address the speed and smoothness problems I invariably run into.

Here's an example of a movie clip, a *good* icon made from that movie clip, and my pathetic attempt.

There's the bit. (EEEEEE I love Sherlock! *cough*)

Here's a great animated icon from this scene:



The animated part of the icon is only 75 pixels wide, which helps reduce the file size (lj icons can only be 40k, as we know).

Even keeping my animation 75 pixels wide, with the same number of frames, I couldn't reduce the file size to less than 80k. And, as per usual, my version looks like Sherlock is auditioning for the remake of Chariots of Fire, even though I've set the frame rate to 0 seconds (no delay).

Here's what my attempt looks like:



If anyone has ANY ideas for me, I'd be oh-so-grateful. I'm using Photoshop CS4 to make the icons, and I grab the video from The Usual Places, generally in .avi format.

Comments

[nomadicwriter]

I don't know how to do it in ImageReady, I'm afraid, since I use Animation Shop, but the best way to make the file size smaller is usually to reduce the number of colours. It sometimes makes the image too grainy, but it tends to work well on mini-movies because they're small-scale and the source is often pretty dark. (Notice the first icon has slightly darker colours than yours? That helps in colour-reduction, because when the image has lots of very dark shades, you can convert a lot of those shades to black without it being too visible.) Looking at the file details, that first icon has only 63 colours while yours still has the max 255; if I reduce yours down to 63, the file size drops to 33k and it still looks okay.

And I think the reason yours looks jerky is actually because the frame delay is too small. In an icon, you're working with a limited selection of frames, so you have to slow them down a little bit to get it to look smooth - i.e., if your animation is only using every fifth frame from the original video, then each one has to last five times as long to make it look like it's playing at the right speed. The first icon has a frame delay of 5 rather than zero, and that makes it look much smoother.

(On the plus side, your jerky icon looks fine to me in Internet Explorer, because IE refuses to respect frame rates below 5 and slows the animation down anyway. ...Which is probably why there's some confusion about frame delays out there in tutorial land, actually.)

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

I set my frame delay to .5 seconds and it goes *even slower*.

How did you open the original icon as an animation? I can only open it as a finished .gif (single-layer)?

[nomadicwriter]

I saved it to my hard-drive and opened it in Animation Shop, where it comes up as an animation automatically. I don't know anything about making animated GIFs in Photoshop, sorry. I only have Paint Shop Pro.

Edit: Also, sorry, that delay should be 0.05 - I forgot Animation Shop specifies it in 100ths of a second, duh.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Hee. Okay, tried .05 -- still insanely slow. ARGH. I don't understand why I can't figure it out. There is *no way* that every single awesome mini-movie icon I've seen was made in Animation Shop. I REFUSE TO BELIEVE THIS.

grar.

[nomadicwriter]

Ack. Sorry I can't be more help. Trying to do cross-program support is so confusing. Damn those developers and all their using different systems to do the same things!

Does it still run slow when you save it and open it in the browser? If that doesn't help, I've got no clue, I'm afraid.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Well, you can see if it's too slow here in the post. On my browser, it is. And you seem to say it looks fine?

[nomadicwriter]

It looks fine in Internet Explorer (which actually slows animations down if they're too fast) and moves really fast in Animation Shop. ...Wow, that is really odd. And yet you're getting the top animation at normal speed? The only thing I can think is that Photoshop is adding some sort of data to the image that's slowing up your browser/system but not mine. Bizarre...

I Googled around about slow GIF animations from Photoshop and got some hits suggesting other people are having the same problem, but no solutions as yet. :/

Out of curiosity, how fast does this run for you? It's just your icon re-saved in AS and re-uploaded:



...At this stage, I am all out of constructive advice beyond downloading a copy of GIMP and trying to do the animation in that. That is so weird.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

Out of curiosity, how fast does this run for you?

Still Chariots of Fire. I tried it in Safari - not only is mine slow, but now the *other* one is slow too. I don't much feel like downloading IE...

is GIMP free? Does it work on Macs?

[nomadicwriter]

is GIMP free? Does it work on Macs?

Yep! I've never tried using it for animations, but there are various tutorials on Google: this one looks like it might be helpful. It's probably worth a try, anyway, since hey, it's freeware.

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

I'm in the same boat. I've only ever gotten a few animated gifs to work, and never anything as complicated as a mini movie.

So far, my best ones have been done as follows:

1) Use Quicktime Pro to save a clip from movie as individual frame images.

2) Import the folder of frame images into ImageReady so that each frame is a separate frame.

3) Trim it way the hell down and hope for the best.

So far, these are the best I've managed. As you can see, they're all animation- easier to pick out unnecessary frames than real video.

[tzikeh.livejournal.com]

#1 - HE'S TERRIFIC, HE'S MAGNIFIC, HE'S THE GREATEST SUPER-HERO IN THE WORLD

#2 - Yeah, that's exactly how I've been doing it; but:

#3 - Animation has far fewer pixels than movies.

[stevenglassman.livejournal.com]

I know. Alas, I've never been able to get a smooth animation from film. Just no luck there.