GIF Speed & Frame Interval Calculator

FPS and per-frame delay are two sides of the same timing

24 frames driven by a 12 FPS target produces a 2.00 second total duration, a per-frame delay of 83.33 milliseconds, and a suggested GIF-format delay value of 8 (in the format's native 1/100-second units).

Duration = frame count / FPS = 24 / 12 = 2.00 seconds -- and per-frame delay is simply the inverse relationship, 1000ms / FPS = 1000 / 12 = 83.33ms, confirming that FPS and per-frame delay are just two different ways of expressing the identical timing.

The GIF format's suggested delay value (8) comes from converting that 83.33ms delay into the format's native centisecond (1/100 second) units: 83.33 / 10 = 8.33, rounded to 8 -- this rounding step is the reason GIF playback speed often doesn't perfectly match an intended FPS value.

Why GIF's storage format introduces its own rounding

GIF delay is stored in 1/100 s units. Encoders may round again. GIF's file format stores frame delay in units of 1/100th of a second (centiseconds) rather than milliseconds -- a coarser granularity than most video or animation formats use, which means a precise millisecond delay value (like 83.33ms) has to be rounded to fit into GIF's native centisecond storage, introducing a small, unavoidable timing discrepancy.

Beyond this format-level rounding, individual GIF encoding software may apply its own additional rounding or minimum-delay enforcement (some browsers historically enforced a minimum delay floor for very fast GIFs) -- meaning the actual delay value your specific encoder writes to the file could differ slightly from this calculator's suggested value.

This rounding effect compounds at higher target FPS values -- a target of 30 FPS (a 33.3ms delay) rounds to 3 centiseconds (30ms), actually playing back closer to 33.3 FPS in practice, a real, if usually minor, discrepancy between intended and actual GIF playback speed caused entirely by the format's coarse centisecond granularity.

Related animation and file-format tools

For working with a related CSS-based rotation animation instead of a frame-based GIF, the CSS Keyframe Animation Generator covers that different animation technique.

For estimating the resulting file size of an animated image, the Image File Size Estimator is a related, though single-frame-focused, sizing tool.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)