GIFS in PowerPoint

A short lived obsession with GIFs in PowerPoint.

Why GIFs? 
- they make slides (games) so much more attractive overcoming certain PowerPoint limitations
- available free by the truckload on the web
- millions to choose from
- might make a good template for a game

Why obsession?
- they open new attractive graphical possibilities
- the possibilities are doubled (tripled) once you add your own PowerPoint animations on top

Why short lived?
- the more GIFs on a slide the more jerky the animations become
- the smoother the GIF animation the more PowerPoint power needed to animate it (not necessarily PC power)
- the 2 reasons above significantly restrain the GIF amount used on a single slide 



A working example to download here. Try clicking the planet - the astronaut can't quite reach his jetpack.

What do you think?

My overall framerate during this ppsx is abysmal, yet despite that, by combining the different GIFs together to create this planet-like thing, you've managed to create a very lively little world which we got a glimpse of. That, I felt the need to applaud at least. (Legit, I thought the entire planet was one huge GIF at first. Maybe if that's the actual case, it would improve the graphic's performance?)

Powerpoint has many limitations, so idle-animation has always been a novelty to behold whenever it makes an appearance in this platform. Everything always looked prettier when they move around, I found this one out while developing the demo for Avoid The Dark. You might've noticed the yellow glowy stripes in the void that doesn't do anything but blink on and off, it actually gave the slide a breathe of life and the comparison is clear as day when you remove them out.

Jarek wrote:- the more GIFs on a slide the more jerky the animations become
- the smoother the GIF animation the more PowerPoint power needed to animate it (not necessarily PC power)
- the 2 reasons above significantly restrain the GIF amount used on a single slide

Going from this, I reckon there would be an optimal number of GIF to be used in a slide, an optimal size and how many frames of images does a GIF cycles through. The limit most likely varies depending on how many GIFs you wanted to use, I think its possible to adjust from there and compress your GIFs until its compact enough to optimize the framerate's performance.

All in all, cool findings! Should be able to inspire someone who's willing to pour-in the effort, perhaps to create their custom-made GIF asset for their games. I feel like that could work somehow, I wonder how it would fare out.

GIFs can be great for PPT. In 2021, they added in a new feature that lets you export presentations a GIFs, which is super useful.

As for optimization, you can use some tricks to make sure that they don't bog things down too much.

Maybe making own gifs despite the fact that as easy as it may seem it looks quite tedious.

Or perhaps as xPLAYn suggests testing and playing around with new PPT capabilities.

Or optimizing the gifs found on the net.

But either way it has to be a compromise between quality and performance. WHY ?!?! That's not fair! 

Well, an artist will adjust their allocation of creativity to produce what they believed to be the finest possible version of their craft. I'm sure us creators knows what is the best way to create the games we envisioned, be it by using freely available ready-to-use resources or down the rough path of originality.

But man, being set aback by the limits of our hardware capabilities really does suck.

There are quite a few sites for making your own Gifs. I usually use this one https://ezgif.com/maker

You only need a few still images to put together. I used it for the Hungry Hippos games.

You can also use the 3D images that PPT supplies to make stills of an image in different positions, then string them together as a Gif using the ezgif site.

Thanks John!
I'll definitely look into that.

Which version of PowerPoint is the OP using? This ran extremely smoothly on my computer with Office 365. I had a similar obsession with GIFs in PowerPoint for a few years around 2014-2016 because I wanted to make an authentic Sonic the Hedgehog quiz game. I found that PowerPoint's behavior with GIFs varied greatly from version to version. 2007 worked just okay and 2010 worked well, though it used a lot of system resources. Microsoft changed how slides were rendered for 2013, and that caused a massive decrease in performance and looked like the OP described. Additionally, directly inserting longer GIFs ballooned the PPT's file size far past the size of the GIF. To get around that I inserted the GIF as a linked image. For 2016 they changed the renderer again, this time for the better, and GIFs played extremely smoothly, though slightly faster than they are actually timed.

A cool trick in versions 2007-2019 is that you could insert a GIF as a movie and set it to play on command, as part of the timeline, or by a trigger. I used this in my "Mario Kart Board Game" to play a GIF of the animation when you select your character to make it authentic to playing Mario Kart 64. I made my "Sonic the Hedgehog Quiz Game" entirely populated with PNGs and GIFs created from the sprites from the game. This game played extremely smoothly in 2019 and 2016, and fairly smoothly in 2010, but was unplayable in 2007 and consistently crashed 2013. If you are using 2007 or 2013, I recommend testing your PPTs with GIFs in PowerPoint Viewer as it is based on 2010. My games used 16-bit sprites that are extremely low resolution, so your mileage may vary for your higher resolution GIFs.

Unfortunately, last year Microsoft changed GIFs again in the Office 365 version, and it took away the feature to insert GIFs as movies and play them on command. It also plays looping GIFs while editing, which I find annoying.

In Summary, here is the order of the best versions of PowerPoint for playing GIFs in my opinion:
1. 2010 & PowerPoint Viewer (as the timing seems more accurate)
2. 2019 & 2016
3. Office 365 (plays as smoothly as 2019 & 2016, but cannot play on command)
4. 2007 
5. Extremely poor performance in 2013

Also, here are a couple of tips for improving PowerPoint performance on your computer:
1. Make sure that PowerPoint is using your computer's dedicated graphics card instead of your processor's built-in graphics. If you are using Windows 11, the you can change this in the Settings. If you are using an older version of Windows, you can control this from nVidia Control Panel or AMD Radeon Software.

2. Make sure that the 64-bit version of Office is installed on your machine. This will allow PowerPoint to use more than 2GB of RAM and I think may unlock more processor performance.

powelldr wrote:Also, here are a couple of tips for improving PowerPoint performance on your computer:
1. Make sure that PowerPoint is using your computer's dedicated graphics card instead of your processor's built-in graphics. If you are using Windows 11, the you can change this in the Settings. If you are using an older version of Windows, you can control this from nVidia Control Panel or AMD Radeon Software.

2. Make sure that the 64-bit version of Office is installed on your machine. This will allow PowerPoint to use more than 2GB of RAM and I think may unlock more processor performance.

Excellent tips, thanks for sharing!

Thanks powelldr!
I changed the default graphics card for PowerPoint and runs now buttery smooth. 
I will try that out for some other selected programs.

This is a bit late share of my findings - actually I noticed what was happening much earlier. 
Powerpoint indeed started running smooth - for a short while, meaning some minutes. Then I started getting problems with screen flicker on my laptop and Powerpoint would also start acting up on me. Powerpoint couldn't handle my nVidia Geforce RTX 3070. But why each time after a short while and not immediately? I dunno. So, sadly, I cancelled my dedicated graphics card acceleration from Powerpoint.

These posts have certainly highlighted my technical inadequacies - Thanks guys!! But never mind. Luckily, I've never had problems with Gifs, maybe due to my big desktop PC.

Anyway...I've just posted a new animation DOGFIGHT . Initially, the red biplane had no propeller so I made one out of 'Shapes' and gave it a fast Spin animation (a smaller version of the big propeller). All was going well until I animated the plane and the propeller jointly with a motion path to go to the edge of the slide then back again. Mid-way through the motion path, the propeller became detached from the plane near the turning point, only to join it again near the end of the path. 

I tried a few things to try an fix this but to no avail. Then I thought...what about a Gif! I couldn't find a suitable ready-made Gif, so with 4 pictures of the plane with the propeller in 4 different positions, I made one in Ezgif site. After a bit of tinkering, I got a pretty good end result.



I positioned the propeller on the plane in PPT, then saved each image as a picture. One thing I discovered that was where the propeller protruded above the plane to different degrees, the saved pictures were different heights. This made for a very juddery Gif! To rectify this, on PPT again, I added a transparent rectangle to the top of each picture and made them all the same size. Fortunately this worked.

Few things to note about optimizations with GIFs in PPT:

1. GIFs which contain transparencies will be much tougher for PPT to render, as opposed to ones which are always opaque. Picking a color background for the GIF and hiding it within a scene would probably be advised (would give off an 80's microcomputer vibe, but for a different reason XD)

2. Every GIF is initialized upon startup, and is adjusted once per frame, not once per engine cycle. This means that GIFs can easily overload the slide rendering engine if they move too quickly. Reducing frames will not help, but putting in duplicate frames to slow the animation speed down will help, as even though the gif is still being changed at the same speed, it decreases the rendering load for the engine, especially if you heed #3.

3. Using the built-in optimization tools is also an excellent way to save on performance headroom. Compressing the GIF to a smaller size and then using an animated "grow / shrink" animation to re-enlarge it also saves on performance, due to how the grow / shrink animation is rendered.

4. In some cases, using a video file can actually be better than a GIF in terms of rendering headroom, especially when using the compression tools built into PPT.

There's more that could be said, but hopefully tips and tricks like these can help