Month: April 2023

Top image is a 300 frame animated .gif and compresses to 29MB.  Its first frame has 256 of a possible 256 unique colors.

Bottom image is a 300 frame animated .png and compresses to 58MB.  Its first frame has 10568 of a possible 16,800,000 unique colors.

The banding issue created by the restricted color palette of .gif’s is an annoying, always present and unavoidable limiter.  And since lately I’ve been doing a bunch of renders using volume lights (they produce really subtle gradients that require lots of color for smooth transitions) they get chunky and banded in the 256 colors allowed in a .gif.

I really had no idea there was near universal browser support for animated .png’s these days.  They’re a lot bigger, but I might start posting them instead of .gif’s.  Depends, though. 

A couple of concerns, each page on the blog can display 10 animations at once and 10 .png animations all running at once may melt devices. 

Also, one of the nice things about the crummy quality of .gif’s is that it sort of acts as a copyright, theft-deterrent security measure.  The animated .png’s are full on render quality.  Hm.  They sure look much nicer, though.