A small GIF created using After Effects. Shot using a Canon Rebel T2i at 1/125th of shutter speed, F5.6 and 3200 ISO. 60 shots composited into a single animated GIF. A slight shift in frames can be observed as the camera got displaced infinitesimally while pressing the shutter button. The original GIF composite at 5184x3456 resolution turned out to be 340 MB. This is the scaled down version of the same. The loss of quality is evident. This takes time to load. In this case time is not flying :-P but seems to reset itself, stuck in an endless loop....
To improve quality a little bit i tried to shoot the images in raw and then resize them using the image processor feature of photoshop and composit them in after effects after a little correction to the exposure. Here is the result. A little more vibrant than before but still having a presence of a grainy noise.
To eliminate the noise that was visible a different approach needs to be followed. Most of the objects in the image are still with only the second hand moving. With the following steps the grainy pixel motion can be eliminated.
1. Create a layer above the animation sequence containing the first frame of the animation.
2. On top of this create a black solid and using the pen tool crop it to the radius of the watch.
3. The solid in [2] will act as an alpha inverted matte for the layer created in [1]. Hence set the track matte of layer one to Alpha inverted.
4. Render as GIF animation with web safe colors.
The output is below. Much improvement over the other two. Of course a very small displacement of the watch dial is visible due to camera shake while pressing the shutter release. Click to load (11 MB)
