I am trying to have animated advertisements on my home page (fade in...pause...fade out, next banner..) to make it more dynamic, but all the programs I have tried export the animation at sizes that I consider too large. GIF animations (Bannershop GIF Animator 5) end up being ~100-200KB and flash animations (Adobe ImageReady) export at ~80KB at best. I start with an image that's only around 10KB (optimized in imageready as best I can--30 quality, progressive), and after a simple fade animation of a couple frames, it becomes 10 times the size. I am relatively new to this, so i'm sure i'm overlooking a lot of file crunching techniques. I'd really appreciate any input on how to establish this simple fade effect without the large file size. Manual modifications, different programs, different formats, javascript? anything that works! Thanks!
I've run into the same problem using ImageReady to decrease the file size of the free animated avatars that are offered on my site. The only things I've been able to do are to decrease the overall size and/or length of the gif and to remove frames, while increasing the time per frame to compensate. For instance, if it doesn't make it too jerky, you can remove every other frame and then play with the timing until it looks right. If anyone has any other ideas, I'd be interested also.