Comedians would tell you that timing is the most important part of any joke. The same could be said about animated GIFs; whether they’re used as a meme or to illustrate a process, the speed of an animated GIF can effect its effectiveness. With that idea in mind, I set about trying to figure out how to modify the speed of an animated GIF; let’s explore it!
Let’s use the following GIF as our sample:
The first step in modifying a GIF’s speed is determining the GIF’s root speed; to determine this ratio, we’ll use ImageMagick’s identify
command:
identify -verbose respect.gif | grep Delay > Delay: 5x100 > Delay: 5x100
The ratio returned represents the hundredths of a second between the animated GIF’s frames.
To speed up the animation, we can use a smaller ratio:
convert -delay 1x30 respect.gif respect-fast.gif
To slow down the, we can use a larger ratio:
convert -delay 1x100 respect.gif respect-slow.gif
Animated GIFs still have a place on the web; optimizing their effectiveness remains important. If you need to speed up or slow down an animated GIF, look no further than ImageMagick!
Designing for Simplicity
Before we get started, it’s worth me spending a brief moment introducing myself to you. My name is Mark (or @integralist if Twitter happens to be your communication tool of choice) and I currently work for BBC News in London England as a principal engineer/tech…
CSS @supports
Feature detection via JavaScript is a client side best practice and for all the right reasons, but unfortunately that same functionality hasn’t been available within CSS. What we end up doing is repeating the same properties multiple times with each browser prefix. Yuck. Another thing we…
HTML5 Placeholder Styling with CSS
Last week I showed you how you could style selected text with CSS. I’ve searched for more interesting CSS style properties and found another:
INPUT
placeholder styling. Let me show you how to style placeholder text withinINPUT
elements with some unique CSS code. The CSS Firefox…