Please can someone fill me in on how to convert a adobe flash animation to a GIF animation and still retain the quality of the image. I tried it but the animation comes out bad(blurry).
If you have Adobe Flash, you can go to Export > Export Movie and change it to Animated GIF.
Conversion of Flash animation or video (without sound) to
other high resolution image formats such as JPG or PNG is
posibble though it is a slow & manual (by hand) process.
You can use the (free) VLC media player to extract still frames from flash.
These individual still frames can then be animated using javascript or
jQuery and a quick search of google for “jpeg animation + jQuery” should
find you a demo pretty quickly.
Less well known about is the APNG image format, animated PNGs!
these support 24-bit images and 8-bit transparency not available for GIFs
Not all browsers support the format but those that do will see the ball bouncing,
APNG is backwards compatibale so older browsers just see a regular static png image.
Building them is not easy but the GIMP graphics editor does now have a plugin
that can handle them as for photoshop it’s not supported at all.
I’ll be covering this in the second half of my Dynamic Animated Signature Tag tutorial
over at Lovelogic.net in the near future.:x
Interesting problem, I hope this was useful to you.
Flash doesn’t produce optimal results outputting as gif because there isn’t sufficient control over the parameters.
If photoshop is also available, it’s possible to get far better results by outputting from flash as an image sequence, then importing this to photoshop, then using ‘save for web’ from there.
Gif inherently tops out at 256 colors, so unless you made your flash animation palletized with 256 colors or less…
Uhm… no. Can’t be done. You’re going to have dithering, loss of resolution, and the resulting file will be too massive to put on a website.
Though I say that about flash animations too… cute, trendy, and ultimately useless resulting in annoying websites. Unless you’re writing a game or doing video playback, do the world a favor and back away from the animated nonsense.
Sogo7’s example animated png being a perfect example – at 71k larger than I’d allocate for an entire site skin - markup+CSS+images+scripts. (not counting content). It’s good it’s a bouncing ball - because that’s what animations on websites usually result in – bounce from the user getting sick of waiting for it to download.