Making small animated GIFs or SWFs in Rails

Rails
1

Hi -

I’m trying to programatically create animated images. It’s relatively
easy with RMagick, but the animated GIFs are huge. Is there a way to
convert animated GIFs to SWF in Rails (and shrink them in the
process), or is there any way to create SWFs given a bunch of frames?

Thanks,
Kevin

2

GIF is already a heavily-compressed (RLE) format. You can optimize the
compression by flattening the color palette, using fewer colors and no
gradient fades.

But how large (pixels) are the resulting GIF images? If you’re just
animating between static frames, there’s nothing magical about SWF
that will shrink the result. The file size savings come when you
create the image out of vector illustrations (pure abstract math)
rather than a grid of pixels.

So there’s no magic bullet except making the image smaller that will
give you file-size savings if all you’re doing is switching between
static frames.

Walter