Web Whiz Bang: The Pros and Cons of Adding FLASH to your site

Add visual movement or animation

There are a number of animated graphic formats available. In this section we'll look at the two of the more common and longer established ones. Many of the plug-ins are widely used for animated effects.

• Animated GIF
• Quicktime and QuickTimeVirtual Reality

  demonstrate adjectives, adverbs, prepositions better than a static medium
  short, low quality video clips as source material
  QTVR allows limited manipulation of object or point of view
  

  *Animated GIFs

  most common way of including animated graphics

  • author needs to have graphic editor to create all the stills
  • author needs to have software that combines the stills to create the animation
  • no problem with server
  • files can get quite large (100's of K), but are typically about 20 K
  • to minimize file size: reduce image area, number of colours, bit depth, amount of change, number of still images in animation
  • user needs nothing special
    

  Quicktime

  • plays low-res audio and or video movies, user can control presentation
  • author needs to have software to create or import the animation or movie
  • server has to be configured to serve files
  • files are typically hundreds of Kilobytes for less than a minute
  • to minimize file size: reduce image area, length of animation, frames per second
  • user must have a quicktime player plug-in or helper application installed
    

  Quicktime Virtual Reality

  • allows user to have 360 degree view or change/move objects by dragging mouse across window rather than clicking on buttons to start and stop animation
  • same points as for quicktime: one 360 degree view can be hundreds of Kilobytes