shane madej: long-legged cryptid.

HEY!

AO3 is in danger of becoming CENSORED. if you have donated $10 or more BEFORE june 30th, PLEASE exercise your right to vote (as you should have received an email to) and VOTE AGAINST TIFFANY GU, who is PRO-CENSORSHIP and PRO making AO3 “palatable” for outsiders and antis.

this is one of the few places dead dove writers/illustrators have to post our content, which is NOT illegal, immoral, or a threat to society. however, CENSORSHIP IS.

if you have the opportunity to vote, PLEASE TAKE IT.

now having transparency within a gifset is important because it allows gifmakers to get around the ‘you can only upload 10 gifs’ rule, while still preserving your tumblr experience, whatever layout your in whether it’s light mode or dark mode or anything in between. but converting to .mp4 completely changes this. you cannot preserve transparency with .mp4. this means any gif that includes multiple gifs within one canvas? it’s going to have white lines inbetween.

here is an example of a multiple-gifs-in-one saved as .gif:

and this is it now in .mp4 format:

not only is the quality severely impacted (ew), but also it has these white bars which are at complete contrast with how the rest of the set looks in dark mode.

i know to non-gifmakers it may seem overdramatic for us to complain about this change, but it really does entirely alter the giffing techniques we as gifmakers employ to make our gifs look smooth for your consumption. 

It’s because the MP4 files are smaller. Yes, they don’t look as good, yes they’re not perfect, but they’re smaller and able to be loaded by less powerful devices.

The gif sets you all make are astoundingly beautiful, amazing even. A single gifset can crash my $300 phone. I have to keep them in the mobile data mode always or my dashboard is unusable.

And the options are compressing the gifs or using MP4 files.

Because GIF does per frame compression and MP4 does temporal compression (if a pixel stays a color for several frames that pixel only has to be in a single frame), there will be far more banding and color crushing in compressed GIFs versus the MP4 option.

what is wrong with mobile data mode? with that mode, you can pick and choose what you want to play. you know what will crash your phone and what won’t. isn’t that a happy compromise between more complex gifsets existing that may crash the app and also getting enjoyment out of the site and people’s creations? i don’t know if you’ve actually bothered to look up any .mp4 changes, but the more intricate the gifset, the worse it ends up looking under conversion. so i can tell you now, people won’t bother. there is no point spending hours working on something only for it to look awful on upload. 

A comment on a fic more than once gave me the idea or inspiration I needed to add another part to that fic. It helped me to produce even more of the content that the reader who left it enjoyed so much.

A comment on an older fic reminded me that my fics don’t get lost 24 or 48 hours after posting. True, that’s when most fics get the majority of their hits, kudos and comments, so a writer sometimes feels like if a fic hasn’t done well in that time frame, it’s as good as gone. But some people discover and love such fics later on and that’s incredible.

A comment once stopped me from deleting my AO3 account. For reasons, I was feeling really low, like I had no talent and nothing to offer. Like everything I was posting was banal and worthless. And as my finger was hovering over the ‘delete account’ button, a mail notification let me know that someone left a comment on one of my fics. I went to read it and it was absolutely lovely. And it complimented not just that fic, but my writing overall. It helped me get through a rough moment.

Your comments can mean so much more than you know. You have more capacity to do good and help content creation in the fandom, that you and others enjoy, than you realize.