I agree with Eric, you can get pretty good quality out of gifs. I used gifs to showcase animations in my portfolio using photoshop. It allows you to set the lossy, transparency other pattern algorithms to reduce size. Depending on the dimensions, you can get great quality with reasonable file sizes.
Hmm, alright. I've been using Flash to create my gifs and no matter what setting configurations, it still looks like crap. Especially gradients. I would prefer to avoid putting flash stuff on my site and I feel like all the animations are small and short, that making a video out of them would be a bit much.. I'll mess…
GIFs are pretty good, but they can get big. Did this one recently, it's 8mb. http://ericchadwick.com/img/volcano_loop.gif Kind of too big, but it has a lot of gradients, so it doesn't compress well. I did reduce it to 15fps, but the dithering and the frame size make it big. Photoshop does a pretty good job with GIFs, it's…