Re: FLASH: Filter/plugins for Flash 5?

[John Dowdell]

>> ...over-reliance on pixel-based imagery usually makes huge files,

>> that stream chunkily, and which will slow down with even a single

>> pixel's worth of resizing....

>

> In many cases a single highly compressed bitmap can be more efficent

> than a gaggle of vector objects.


That's true, there can certainly be some cases where they're appropriate.


This does not invalidate what I actually said, though: Each and every day,

on each and every list, we see people hurt by an over-reliance on

pixel-based imagery.


The fact that they're often bad, does not imply that they're always bad...

the fact that they're sometimes good, does not imply that they're always

good.




> Perhaps future versions of the Flash player could improve upon the

> present version's performance with bitmaps?  Maybe it could support

> advanced compression techniques?  That would be a very very cool thing.


Work could go there, but there's already a far superior fixed-resolution

bitmap display engine... the Shockwave Player is on the majority of

consumer systems out there. For compositing it's many, many times faster

than the realtime vector-rendering engine, and also supports other media

types like digital video and realtime 3D.


For "advanced compression techniques" we use mostly precompressed GIF and

JPG graphics, with live links to the source material... no matter which

brand of photo-processor or painting tool you use, you can hit the "Update"

button in Macromedia Flash to retrieve a newly-compressed version. (There's

also internal bitmap compression, but it seems more sensible to rely on

dedicated bitmap utilities for tweaking compression.)


Compression techniques also include the core vector curves, and bringing

many types of vector graphics into the Macromedia Flash authoring

environment can result in an overall reduction of the size of the curves...

this vector compression occurs behind the scenes. (If you don't mind

possible changes to the visuals then you can also manually manipulate this

with the smoothing options for even greater vector compression.)



jd








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