Gif is an ancient format, mp4 is something like 30 years newer, so file sizes are much smaller in mp4. Most “gif” files you see are in fact not actually gif files. “gif” has become a synonym for “short duration looped video”
Compressing files efficiently is hard to achieve, that’s why the newer formats will produce a smaller file size. As you said, gif is a simpler format, therefore it is less advanced at compressing file size
In particular, GIF is just a bundle of images with generic file compression slapped on top. MP4 and similar instead analyze the frames and only store the differences compared to the previous frame.
Gifs have a compressed look to them because it’s quite limited in number of colours it can have. But gifs are ~acrually uncompressed~ barely compressed lossless images, similar to .bmp (bitmaps).
Edit: Clarified GIFs are actually compressed, just lossless.
Gif is an ancient format, mp4 is something like 30 years newer, so file sizes are much smaller in mp4. Most “gif” files you see are in fact not actually gif files. “gif” has become a synonym for “short duration looped video”
I didn’t realize that, I would have assumed gifs, being a simpler format, would be smaller
Thank you for teaching me something! 😊
Compressing files efficiently is hard to achieve, that’s why the newer formats will produce a smaller file size. As you said, gif is a simpler format, therefore it is less advanced at compressing file size
In particular, GIF is just a bundle of images with generic file compression slapped on top. MP4 and similar instead analyze the frames and only store the differences compared to the previous frame.
Gifs have a compressed look to them because it’s quite limited in number of colours it can have. But gifs are ~acrually uncompressed~ barely compressed lossless images, similar to .bmp (bitmaps).
Edit: Clarified GIFs are actually compressed, just lossless.
GIF does do some mild compression (with an algorithm from 1984). But the compression is lossless like bitmap, if that’s what you mean…
Thanks for pointing it out. I forgot if they were actually compressed or not.