Did this by grabbing the movie from NOAA, convert it into .png images with "mplayer", then using imagemagick ("convert") to convert the images to correctly cut smaller images (40% size of original video). And finally I used "whirlgif" to compose the animated gif. One optimization I did was to animate only the part of the movie that actually moves and let the surrounding world just be a background image in the animated gif.
These are the commands I used on my Debian GNU/Linux box:
$ mplayer TITOV-INDO2004.mov -vo png
$ convert -scale 40% 00000001.png start.gif
$ for f in *.png; do convert -crop 370x280+90+100 -crop 458x380-90-100 $f tmp.png; convert -scale 40% tmp.png $f.s.gif; echo $f; done
$ ls > incfile.half
(and then I edited incfile.half to only contain i.s.gif where i is an even number with leading zeroes)
$ whirlgif -loop 10000 -globmap -o "2004 Indonesia Tsunami Complete.gif" -time 10 start.gif -off 36:40 -i incfile.half
However, I dont seem to reach the extremely small filesize of the other animated gif (750 kbyte vs 150 kbyte). If someone knows any other ways to optimize the animated gif, please tell me.--Malu5531 15:40, 30 Dec 2004 (UTC)