You did not provide any actual examples, so nobody can give specific details, only general guidelines. Further, without seeing the actual artifacts you are referring to, we can only guess as to the issue you have because there are several different things it could be.
Animated GIFs are not special, they are just a pile of GIFs displayed rapidly in a row.
The artifacts that you experience are likely due to the limited color palette that the GIF format provides. As you have found, you can use dithering to make an 8-bit image look better, but that is only one of the options. Depending on the graphics program, some provide more options, some provide less, and many of the options have different settings and modes. One animated-GIF program that I used years ago was ImageAlchemy. It had numerous options to smooth, blend, dither, crush, etc. the palette in a variety of methods and with different algorithms.
Another artifact you may be experiencing could be due more to your viewer than the file. Some animated-GIF programs have the ability to super-compress an animated-GIF so that it removes all unchanged pixels from each frame so that only the changed parts are stored. This usually only has the effect of making the file smaller, but some viewer programs have trouble with it (they are not fully GIF89a format compliant) and show the animation poorly.
Not surprisingly, the method that will give the best results depends entirely on the specific image. Some images will do fine with a direct palette mapping, others will need to be dithered, others still will require more advanced color transformations.
In addition to the GIF-specific options, another thing you can do to get better quality GIF images is to use an image-editing program to manually reduce it to 8-bit color. That way, you have better control over the color transformation since the reduction done during the format conversion/save may not be sufficient whereas the color tools in-program can provide greater accuracy and more options.
1Do you have some examples you could show us? – slhck – 2012-11-30T10:47:32.713
maybe by applying smoothing to each frame in the animated gif. just a quick thought, hope it helps. there's have to be software programs that allow you to do that, sorry nothing specific comes to mind right now. – LittleFighter – 2012-11-30T10:59:40.037
How does the title of your question relate to the question itself? – Scott – 2012-11-30T16:57:02.760