Grrr Argh!

[katysam]

I bow to all you animated icon makers. You seriously rock! Seriously.

I have attempted to make my first Supernatural one and talk about frustrating! It's taken me over an hour (or more) to come up with this:

Thanks to psychoactivtoad for the inspiration. :)

How hard is it to get in the required number of frames, the right background image and text, and still keep it to 40kb or less? *sigh*

Anyone got any handy-dandy animated icon tips?

Comments

[bobbinrob.livejournal.com]

lol I feel your pain
are you making them with avi files or frames?
you have PS right?

[katysam.livejournal.com]

I was hoping you'd sympathise ;)
I'm using frames. I didn't know I could use AVI files...
Yep, CS2.

[bobbinrob.livejournal.com]

hehe :p ah ok I only ever used frames for a full animation once, I now always use Avi files, I find them easier
but theres a good tute here: http://nyaubaby.livejournal.com/32559.html
for frames
CS2 FTW!

[katysam.livejournal.com]

Thank you so much! *hugs*

The tute looks very detailed and at first glance I can already see where I was going wrong time-wise.

I'll have to take a look at using AVIs at some stage too. Thanks for the tip. ♥

[blackbirdj2.livejournal.com]

Yes, I would also recommend the tutorial by nyaubaby. I couldn't make animated icons if my life depended on it, and when I found her tutorial a lot of things became clear to me. My frustration with icons is also the 40kb limit. That is soooooo limited. *sigh*
But anyway, your icon is looking good! ♥

[katysam.livejournal.com]

The tute does look very good. I'm going to study it and see if it can help me. I'm sure it will. I noticed one part where she mentioned she once squeezed 40+ frames in an icon. I was struggling to get 11 in and keep it under 40kb.
Thank you :)

[blackbirdj2.livejournal.com]

If you have that much frames, you really have to cut back on the colours sometimes, and that really sucks because the pretty colours lost on Jensen and Jared is never a good thing! ;)

[katysam.livejournal.com]

I noticed after I posting the 'Bachman' icon there was an option when saving to change the number of colours. I fiddled with it a bit and going from 256 to 128 didn't seem all that noticeble and cut the file size down by about 10kb.

[blackbirdj2.livejournal.com]

Exactly. But with a lot of frames, you have to cut back to about 32 colours sometimes, and that's when it gets really bad! :(