P5
Rollovers
– A rollover is an image or link that when you hover over it with your mouse it
changes shape, colour or design. Rollovers are often used on websites on images
so that they can have two pictures on offer without taking up much space. They
are often used on links so that you know when you are hovering over a link.
An advantage
to a rollover is that it looks interesting and adds to the interactivity of the
website. A disadvantage though is that you have to have a newer browser to use
it as older browsers do not support it.
a {
display: block;
width: 100px;
height: 30px;
background-image: url(default.png);
color: white;
}
a:hover {
background-image: url(rollover.png);
color: lightpink;
}
E-cards -
These are cards that you send to someone electronically that contain messages,
pictures, sound clips or videos, they are often sent over email. Advantages of
this over a conventional card is that these are free to send and can be custom
made depending on the person you send them too, they also allow you to add
videos and sound clips that you can’t do on a normal card. A disadvantage of
this over a normal card is that they can be slightly impersonal. On e-cards the
technologies used are usually swf’s, mp3’s and gifs as these are simple files
that are not large in file size. Sound can play a big part in e-cards as you
can personalize a voice message to give to someone and this can be very
personal and thoughtful and also a different way of delivering your message.
Many e-card websites offer
many facilities to use such as creating your own, choosing from their selection
and sharing it on social networking sites.
E-cards also have their use
in viral marketing, if someone creastes a popular and eye catching e-card then
it can catch peoples attention and they can send it to their friends and it can
spread really easily.
Output
Device Issues
When
creating animations developers often make them able to be used on various
different devices such as PC’s, billboards, mobiles and tablets. When making
animations for PC’s there are not many constraints as they have high processing
power, large number of colours, many supported formats and high resolution. The
problems start to arise when you try to move this over to a smaller device such
as a mobile, or a bigger device such as a billboard. The mobile would have less
processing power which means it would not be able to cope with running an
animation made for PC’s. Not only this but mobiles do not have the huge range
of supported formats that PC’s have which means they will not be able to run
the animation. Also, the size of the screen will be smaller and this means the
animation would have to be shrunk down to fit on the screen. These are some of
the reasons that developers have to produce different types of the same
animation that can be viewed on different devices.
M3
The
relationship between quality and file size is very simple when it comes to
media files. The better quality an image or video is, the larger its file size.
This is because when we say an image, for example, is a higher quality, this
generally means that there are more pixels per inch than in the lower quality
version of the same image. And as we all know, the more pixels there are in an
image the larger the file size. This also works the other way. If an image has
a low file size it either means that it is really small or that it is not a
good quality meaning that it contains less pixels. Also, if you compress a file
to reduce the size of the file, it will reduce the quality by getting rid of
some of the information and reducing the quality. This clearly shows the link
between the two.
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Frame disposal is a
key part in any animation and is used pretty much all of the time. Most of the
time there are three frame disposal options; Default, Dispose and Do Not
Dispose. The default setting just does whatever is normal for what software you
are using and what your animation consists of. The dispose setting will turn
frame disposal on and what this does is get rid of the old frame and its images
to make way for the new frame. This means that the old frame will not be seen
through the new frame. Do not dispose is where the old frame stays in place and
the new frame is placed on top of it so you can see the old frame through the
new one. This setting is good if your animation just adds things to the first
frame in the next frames. The do not dispose setting is good for keeping the
file size small because it just means that small things are added to an
existing frame instead of having whole new frames with different and more data.
Auto crop is that something
that is automatically done to the frames in your animation. What this does is
cut down the size of the frames to get rid of any wasted space and help to save
some room and slightly reduce the file size.
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Number of
colours -
The number
of colours in an animation affects the file size. The more colours there are
the more information that goes with it and this means that the file size would
be larger than if the same animation had less colours.
Physical
size of animated image –
An animation
will have a larger file size if the physical size of an image in the animation
is bigger. The bigger the image is, unless it has just been stretched, the
larger the file size is. This is because the image would have many more pixels,
more information and in turn a larger file size.
Resolution
-
The
resolution of an animation is how many pixels it has, and the more pixels it
has the more data that has to be stored which means a larger file size. A lower
resolution would mean a smaller file size but it would also compromise the
picture quality.
Content
of animation -
The file
size depends greatly on the content of the animation. If for example, an
animation contained many large images and sound clips then it would have a
larger file size than an animation that just had a few small images. This is
because the more things there are in an animation the more information that has
to be stored.
Number of
frames -
The amount
of frames in an animation will change the file size. The more frames there are
the larger the file will be. This is because each frame has information on it
and the more frames, the more information that needs to be stored.