TechWhirl (TECHWR-L) is a resource for technical writing and technical communications professionals of all experience levels and in all industries to share their experiences and acquire information.
For two decades, technical communicators have turned to TechWhirl to ask and answer questions about the always-changing world of technical communications, such as tools, skills, career paths, methodologies, and emerging industries. The TechWhirl Archives and magazine, created for, by and about technical writers, offer a wealth of knowledge to everyone with an interest in any aspect of technical communications.
Since this list occasionally has questions relating to graphics, I'm hoping
my own question is appropriate. If not, perhaps some kind soul will inform
me (off list) where I could better direct my search.
Recently I created an animated .gif which was converted to .avi format for
inclusion in the GUI of an upcoming beta for some of our software. My steps
were as follows:
1. I took a screen grab of a logo;
2. Pasted it into PSP;
3. Cut out the part I wanted;
4. Saved that in 256 colors (8-bit) in .gif format;
5. Opened it in Animation Shop;
6. Applied a transition effect;
7. Created an animated .gif.
The animation looks beautiful at a 16-bit color depth but I happened to see
it at 8-bit and it looks *horrible*. This flummoxed me since I was
meticulous in reducing the color depth. (I always either reduce the palette
when saving a grab, if I've grabbed it at a higher color depth, or (more
often) make the screen grab at 8-bit in the first place.) Given that, why
would the resulting animation look so awful? The colors seem to have
undergone some type of substitution (although 256 colors should be more than
enough for the very simple backlit effect I created). FWIW, I didn't do the
conversion from .gif to .avi, since I thought I was sending a "draft" to
development--to my surprise, a developer converted it and put it in a
"wrapper" to incorporate it into the GUI. Could the problem have occurred
during the conversion process (to .avi)? If so, is there any workaround to
avoid the problem if I redo the animation? (I assumed that the conversion
process would be the same, whether in Animation Shop, Gif Construction Set,
or whatever the developer used, but maybe that's an incorrect assumption.)
I would be most grateful if anyone has any experience / wisdom to share on
this subject.
TIA,
Gay Alson
galson -at- stssystems -dot- com
galson -at- wordwdiz -dot- com
*** Deva(tm) Tools for Dreamweaver and Deva(tm) Search ***
Build Contents, Indexes, and Search for Web Sites and Help Systems
Available now at http://www.devahelp.com or info -at- devahelp -dot- com
A landmark hotel, one of America's most beautiful cities, and
three and a half days of immersion in the state of the art:
IPCC 01, Oct. 24-27 in Santa Fe. http://ieeepcs.org/2001/
---
You are currently subscribed to techwr-l as: archive -at- raycomm -dot- com
To unsubscribe send a blank email to leave-techwr-l-obscured -at- lists -dot- raycomm -dot- com
Send administrative questions to ejray -at- raycomm -dot- com -dot- Visit http://www.raycomm.com/techwhirl/ for more resources and info.
