everything old is new again - animated gifs and variable framerates

On a private (and left-leaning) Slack channel about current events, someone posted about the protest truckers coming down with bad coughs, and I realized I didn't have enough emoji-reactions for Schadenfreude, and that Nelson's taunting "HA-HA!" might cover it... 

I tried to upload it in Slack, but it told me it was too big - and shrinking the size of all the frames didn't fix it. Which is weird, because it seems just like 5 or 6 frames...

You can open up GIFs in Mac Preview, and even delete frames:

Looking at it, the problem becomes clear: lots of repeated frames is probably why the file size was large - 5 .1 second frames is larger than 1 .5 second frame even if the frames are identical. (I am assuming, without investigating too much.)

But even though I can delete frames, it didn't seem like I could modify the time for any given frame...

I fired up the App store and after a few false starts found "GIFQuickMaker" which for a few bucks allows more detailed GIF editing, and I ended up with 

which honestly I think has better timing than the original.

the text is almost too small when used as an emoji:

but it gets the idea across.

GIF of course is an archaic and inefficient form, but I love it - the silent films of the web 1.0, the egalitarian geek flipbook. 

But it was funny thinking about why the original Nelson GIF was so inefficient, and I realized that constant framerate is going to be the default for video clips transferred to GIF form. And, kind of akin to the PNG vs JPG difference, animated GIFs should make different assumptions when capturing simple animations. 

And I see the parallel of how "variable refresh rates" is such a hot thing for phones! Very similar thinking, where for animations quicker framerates allow for silky smooth smaller pixel movements, but slower updates make sense for saving power most of the time.

Heh. Reminds me of my old small gif cinema where I had a lot of fun seeing what 40x30 pixels could do. (And in 2002 I even played with putting those on the old Etcha-A-Sketch animator... 12 frames of 40x30 monochrome. Sigh, that came out in 1986, so my art project is even older than it was then...)

UPDATE: Oh, RIP Steve Wilhite, inventor of the GIF!