This led me to start researching what other options I had in the area of animated images. Turns out there is a file format called Animated PNG's... which overcomes the issue of the 256 colours limit on GIFs... Definitely piqued my interest...
The downside, they don't animate in Internet Explorer or Safari. I'm not too fussed about IE but I guess it is a major issue if even Safari doesn't recognise them as animations.
So, how do you make them I hear you ask... Well, there are various plugins and a few windows tools... too difficult a proposition to enter into and not widely supported so why bother.
Here's an example of an apng:
How awesome does it look? How good is the transparency and colour depth? Why haven't the major browsers and image editors jumped onto this one? So annoying!
Interested in looking into them anyway? Check them out here: http://animatedpng.com/
[UPDATE: With a bit more tweaking I managed to make the animated GIFs look OK but they're between 1.4 and 6MB, compared to 168-868KB for the QT videos... Hmmm... Bloody Hell!]
