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March 16, 2005
Compressing Animation Through Color Reduction
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I've been doing a lot of experimenting with animation compression, looking for the best format to deliver photo-quality moving images while minimizing both the download time and the need for the user to have to bother with external players.
Sorenson Squeeze does a good job, and I was happy with how MP4 files could have such good compression with minimizing the degradation of image quality. However, a lot of players don't even recognize the format, and players such as Winamp will play the audio but none of the video.
In terms of delivery, it seemed that an animation has to be embedded into a Flash movie if I want to have a majority of people able to see it without trouble.
In terms of reducing download-time, I wondered why amid the thousands of lossy video codecs there seemed to be none based on color palette reduction. So one experiment was to make a ginormous animated gif of one of my stop-motion animations.
Here is the animation reduced to 7-bit color depth (128 colors)
It's 320x240px, and about 1.3MB.
And here is the same animation reduced to 3-bit color depth (8 colors) at 640x480. The size is about 4.2MB
I quite like the gritty color-optimized look of the second one. There is no real loss of visual information, and in fact adds to the visual effect. I don't want to bother making any more 100+ frame animated gifs, but color compression and embedding in Flash is the way I'm going to continue.
Posted by mslaybau at March 16, 2005 04:24 PM
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