Advantages of animated gif
There are many options these days to create digital media content. gif, jpeg and png are the most popular formats for static images. For video, it could be mov and mp4 are common. Here we are going to review some of the advantages of animated gif files.
GIF files are probably the first image format to support animation and they were supported by allmost all the OS and browser platforms. The GIF file specification has the concept of frame disposal. That is, it indicates what needs to happen after a frame is shown and before showing the next frame. How should the current frame be disposed. There are three disposal options
- None - this means do nothing, i.e., keep the current frame and then overlay the next one
- Previous - restore the image to what it was before displaying the current frame and then overlay the next one
- Background - replace what has been overlayed by the current frame with background color (even though it is possble to have a specific color as background color, it is common to replace it with transparent background) and then overlay the next one
These dipose options coupled with the fact that each frame needs to provide only information that has changed, makes it possible to encode the frames very efficiently especially if the change between the frames is very little. Product demo videos are a good candidate for this since between the user interactions, many frames contain the same UI with just the cursor moving around.
GIF.ti makes use of several technique to ensure the gif animation exported with text is as optimal as possible and at the same time preserving all the colors (as much as possible due to the 256 color limitation of gif files).
If you want to look at each frame and the delta content it represents, use the Delta Frame View option provided in the GIF.ti editor.
Do note that the one main drawback of gif files is that there is no way to pause and restart. However, there are gif players that are capable of providing the pause/resume capabilities within the brower. However, the animation of such players is controlled by the JavaScript libraries and not done natively by the browsers.
One way to overcome the above limitation is to keep the gif animations to short duration (a 2 minute demo video vs a lengthy 30 minute demo), ensure that the text spans enough frames that the user had the time to read it.
GIF.ti provides the text span elements below the thumbnails of the animation frames. Users can adjust the text span by simple drag and resize and as they are performing this action, the duration of the text span is dynamically computed and shown so the user can ensure that the text is visible for sufficient time.