P3 – Discuss the advantages and limitations of animated GIFs

Advantages

• GIFs allow transparency. This allows other images to show through or backgrounds. This is good because you can use transparent images rather than having to use green screen or crop the image out.
• GIFs can be interlaced. This means when the image loads it is blurry and a little pixelated, but then it will start loading in better quality. This is good because it loads a lower quality image first so it loads faster on a website. It beneficial for a speedier download.
• GIF uses a lossless compression which means there is no change in quality when it is compressed; this is very beneficial since you can save as a smaller file but it still has good quality.
• GIFs are easier to make and if you want to make an animated image other than a GIF then flash software would be needed, most advertisements use GIFs because they save money.

Limitations

• There are many limitations of GIFs, one of them is that you can only have 256 colours on a GIF. This means they will not be as good quality as other images that can contain much more colours.
• Using GIFs on things such as website can affect the website; this is because it is animation and may take a while to load on a website, especially if you have a lot of GIFs on one page.
• GIFs can only animate in browsers that allow and support GIFs, this can cause trouble for some people that use other browsers.
• Once the GIF has been made and is animated, it is impossible to back and edit it.
• If you want to upload your GIF to a website you have to make sure it is a reasonable size since you do not want a big size on your website, this means the length of your GIF has a limit.

Shockwave

Shockwave is used for 3D graphics since it specializes in 3d graphics. Shockwave has a fast render engine and is also good for streaming videos. A good point about Shockwave is that is was designed to work with director application, this means it can merge more assets into one multimedia product, this is on a larger scale than flash.

Quicktime

Even though quicktime is made by apple it can still be used on windows and mac. This player supports, sound, animations and videos. It also supports other types of media clips. There are other types of quicktime like Quicktime Broadcaster which is used for streaming, and quicktime pro which is used for creating profession films, this is not free whereas Quicktime is free.

Realplayer

Realplayer is supported across a number of platforms, it can support windows media and quicktime formats. Real players has received a lot of complaints about the advertisements and pop ups. A good point is that it solves the problem of different formats needed for quicktime and windows media player. Realplayer does advertise  a free version but you do not get all of the features that you get with the full program.

DHTML

DHTML means Dynamic HTML, it is a type of HTML that is combined with side scripting. This includes coding languages such as JavaScript. CSS and DOM which means Document object model. This can be used to create animations on a webpage without the use of programs such as flash. It allows you to to makes animation such as rollover buttons or drop down menus,. It can also be used to create games! A downside to DHTML is that there can be platform problems and browser problems since some browsers do not support DHTML. The features you had with DHTML you can now do with CSS which means less people now use DHTML. These features can also be created in flash, which means flash websites are now becoming a lot more popular.


Flash

Flash is now very popular since people use it for many things they need like animations and advertisements. It is used in education a lot to teach people animation, it is at the lower end for animation software. Flash is easy to learn since it can be very similar to other adobe software, and since adobe is quite popular there are many tutorials to view for help. This is a big difference to many other animation programs which can be quite difficult to understand and learn.