Animated GIFs vs Flash - when should I use which ? Options

[shiphen]

Hi

When should we use animated GIFs and when should we use flash?


In order to liven up our products, I have been asked to rotate between different photos. The photos are quite small thumbnails (c.120 pixels wide) and they won't need to slide around the screen or do anything clever - just flick straight from one to the other.


The only way I actually know how to do this is by using animated GIFs.
I have never used flash but I understand that it is a good way to do animations.


The problem with GIFs is of course that they do not compress blended colours very well, and can look rather rough...


But the problem with flash is that:
a) I dont know how to create it (yet)
b) I imagine a number of users will not have flash installed on their
browsers.


Any thoughts?


Ship
Shiperton Henethe


P.S. I normally use Photoshop 6 & XaraXtreme Professional

PPS. Does Xara Xtreme Professional (v4.0) allow you to create Flash exports as animations ?

[steve.ledger]

GIF is only capable of displaying 256 colours and therefore not suitable for photographs. This in itself is enough reason to use flash for your product showcase.

There would be very few users without a flash player installed for their browser to use. Flash is so common on the web today that anyone will have almost certainly been prompted to install the flash player soon after connecting a new PC to the web and browsing a few sites.

I'm in the business of selling and building PC's and, like many other system builders, will make sure that common requirements like a flash player are pre installed.

Oh yes, Xara Xtreme Pro 4 does export flash animation.

[salaam]

Gif files are much more trouble free than flash.

The photos are quite small thumbnails (c.120 pixels wide) and they won't need to slide around the screen or do anything clever - just flick straight from one to the other.

Since your files are so small, I wouldn't worry about .gif colour reduction. It won't notice on thumbnails.

[gwpriester]

GIF is only capable of displaying 256 colours and therefore not suitable for photographs.

Well yes and no Steve. GIF only displays 256 colors, but it selects the best 256 colors from a possible 16.7 million colors and so the results are often quite good. Compuserve created the GIF image format (back in the days when 256 color displays were more common), as a file format for uploading and sharing photographs.

The examples attached are a GIF and a JPEG (20% compression--80% slider setting in Xtreme). You tell me which is which.

I would say the GIF is crisper than the JPEG.

Here's the big difference as I see it. The GIF is 22K the JPEG is about 10. So for a slide show, Flash animation using JPEGs would be better.

[steve.ledger]

True to a point.
But GIF wasn't so much developed for digital photos, quoting from Wiki: it was introduced by COMPUSERV in 1987 to provide a color image format for their file downloading areas, replacing their earlier run-length encoding (RLE). GIFs are suitable for sharp-edged line art (such as logos) with a limited number of colors. This takes advantage of the format's lossless compression, which favors flat areas of uniform color with well defined edges (in contrast to JPEG, which favors smooth gradients and softer images).
Again quoting Wiki:
GIFs can also be used to store low-color sprite data for games.
GIFs can be used for small animations and low-resolution film clips.
In view of the general limitation on the GIF image palette to 256 colors, it is not usually used as a format for digital photography. Digital photographers use image file formats capable of reproducing a greater range of colors, such as TIFF, RAW or the lossy JPEG, which is more suitable for compressing photographs.
The limitation to 256 colors seemed reasonable at the time of GIF's creation because few people could afford the hardware to display more.
In the early days of graphical web browsers, graphics cards with 8-bit buffers (allowing only 256 colors) were common and it was fairly common to make GIF images using the websafe palette which was based on the common subset of the standard Windows and Macintosh palettes.

So even at thumbnail sizes, a photograph is better as a JPG simply due to the data size (your GIF is 21kb where the JPG is less than half the size at 9.7kb)
At the end of the day you agree, Flash is better
Which was the OP's question and my point.

[Egg Bramhill]

I agree with Sledger, Flash is the way to go. It's very easy to test. I attach a xar file from which I created an animated gif and a Flash swf file. Below are the resultant test results. The gif is 2.5 times the file size of the swf as well as only having 16 bit colour (regardless of what the Xara preview window says). Another thing to consider that swf's stream. I don't think animated gifs do, the browser has to download the whole gif before displaying.

I attach the xar file so shipen can see how to create a swf file. To adjust the frame timing just open the Frame Gallery / Properties / Animation Loop and Speed and set the desired time between frames. Choose export as Flash Animation.

[steve.ledger]

Just to make things more confusing, 24bit true colour gif is possible (though not very usable).

All GIF files use colours chosen from the 24-bit RGB color space, so Xtreme preview is likely showing 24-bit at the point before export, where it becomes a web safe 8-bit per pixel image.

With gif animation and gif being palette based with a maximum of 256 colours per frame (and any palette selection can be one of millions of shades), the maximum number that can be used in a complete animation can exceed 256 colours.

[Egg Bramhill]

Thanks for the link. I didn't know that.

[handrawn]

nor me

[ss-kalm]

Me neither..