Topic: Long Animation/Gifs or Videos?

If I'm understanding correctly, you are asking that if animation exceeds X seconds, that should it be video instead?

There are much, much, much more variables to this than just how long the playtime is. Four animation formats you can use that we accept are Flash, GIF, WebM and APNG. All of these formats work differendly and have their own positives and negatives.

  • Flash is pretty much for interactive content and to sites which do not support anything else than that and gif. It seems like almost all flash files I encounter these days are just flash video or JPG image sequence inside flash at which point just use the video.
  • Gif is essentially lossless format, but limits colors to maximum of 256. What that means is that content with lots of color, high framerate, high resolution, complex patters and high movement will bloat into extreme filesizes insanely quickly and will look ugly. That's why something like post #870446 can be long and low filesize, because it's small res, low framerate and only uses black and white nothing in between.
  • WebM is one of the modern video formats, but most applies to other formats as well. WebM manages to maintaing millions of colors, extremely high resolutions and framerates with ease, but it achieves this by being lossy format. If you try to create lossless video file, you might end up with gigabytes filesize with only couple seconds of video, so that's why almost all videos you see online are compressed into lossy format. So quality is technically worse from gif, something like pixel (artwork) suffers immensily from this, but now you can maintain originally already higher quality content with much smaller filesizes, e.g. gif doesn't support 60 FPS, 1080p high color image most likely still looks worse as gif thanks to lack of available colors and gif can't have sound.
  • APNG is also lossless format, but unlike GIF, it does support all of the colors now with partial transparency and other fancy neat stuff. The filesizes are slightly higher in some cases and software support is actually lackluster, to the point where it took like 10 years for chrome to support it.

Answer is look at the content and then go with what format seems to match best. That's why when converting ugoiras for example, sometimes GIF makes sense, most time WebM and then there's scenarios where APNG is the way to go. It mostly comes down to how things look, rather than how long they play.
post #1034650 post #1412495 post #1497201

Altough lenght is still one of those variables, it's much more convinient to end user when they look at the video they know they still have 5 minutes of video left and pause it, not happening with gif or flash video in flash.

Updated by anonymous