How to minimise the size of an animation

When you create an animation the file size will generally be pretty large as the file consists of a lot of separate frames and also transitions between the frames. However, there are ways to reverse this and minimise the size of the file.

There are several different ways you can do this but the main way is to reduce the quality of the images. As the animation only shows each individual frame for a fraction of a second there is no need for HD quality images because they will make the file unnecessarily large. There are a few different ways you can do this but most of the time you should just be able to compress the size of your images and therefore reduce the file size of the animation.

Although you do have to sacrifice some of the quality in order to minimise the file size it is recommended to try to find the best balance possible between file size and quality. There would be no point in having a really high quality animation but it takes forever to load because of its file size and vice versa it would be pointless to have an animation that loads instantly but cannot be understood.

Another good way to minimise the file size of an animation is to make sure to crop all of the images to the right size and to not have any excess white space in any images that will make the file size larger. This can be done by using the crop tool to cut out any transparency or solid colour in the background of an image.

Also when making the animation makes sure to only have the image needed for that frame on that frame. This is called frame disposal. Sometimes when creating an animation a previous frame may stay on the animation for longer than its wanted to by staying in the transparent areas around the image, this will take up more file size and to help minimise the size of an animation you should make sure this doesn’t happen.