Tracing Bitmaps - Page 2

Flash & Images

Now back to Flash. Animation of a bitmap, particularly a JPEG, if you read the section on Importing Images in the FLA Optimisation tutorial, is a big no no. The reason being that your development beast of a computer may be able to handle the animation, but the average joe's CPU and bandwidth may not. The concept of morphing a bitmap is unworkable in Flash too. However there is a technique that you can employ to hold a gun up the a GIFs head and force it to animate and/or morph.

Traced JPEG SWF = 32k+ BAD	Traced GIF SWF = 1k GOOD

If you are dealing with GIFs this would suggest that there are solid blocks of colour in your pic. Provided that your pic has only a few colours and no gradiated areas means that you can trace your bitmap (ie convert it to a vector graphic). Once the pic has been converted into a vector graphic you can then morph it or animate it. But beware if your graphic is too complex prepare yourself for a CPU intensive morph/animation.