ImageReady question

[lee wilson]

Hi people,

I'm creating an animation which is embedded into a webpage:

<http://www.clearworld.co.uk/cone/conerecords.html>

The animation is the text within the speech bubble. The problem is that the simple animation is adding greatly to the file size. Without the animation the files size is 18k and with it 32k.

Surely this cannot be right for a simple animation?

I am new to building animation in IR but the way I am adding a rollover is by creating the seperate frames on sepereate layer in the layer pallete then switching to the animation pallete and hiding/revealing the layer I want on each animation frame.

Any guidance would be appreciated

Thanks
Lee

[Don McCahill]

Sure it can enlarge that much. Every additional layer of animation you add will be adding that many pixels to the image.

I am astonished that the original image is 18K for such a tiny GIF. Are you optimizing in Save for Web be reducing the number of colors as much as possible? You should be able to get away with 8 or 16 colors in those images.

Of course, the more you optimize the image, the smaller the animation file will be as well.

If you want really small animations, you need Flash or LiveMotion. But then users need to be equipped with Shockwave.

[lee wilson]

Sorry, the files size if for the whole page.

The reason I didn't choose flash was because the button rollover state adds text to the bubble, I woul have to create the navigation within flash as well which I am totally against.

Thanks

[John Woram]

Lee, I can't find the animation on the site you mentioned, but there's a few non-IR methods that might work for you. First, save the text bubble as a separate small file, and then blink it on and off on top of the larger file. Or do a rollover and swap the small file with a transparent GIF of the same dimensions.
Here's a demo page--the top image blinks on and off. On the bottom image, roll over the eye to see the effect.

Blink and rollover demos <http://www.woram.com/temp/timer.htm>

[lee wilson]

thanks man, I'll have a detailed look at that tomorrow

Thanks
Lee

[lee wilson]

Hi people, thanks for all the help,

I managed to get the file size to an acceptable size by:

1. Changing the 'quality of the imageMap, this basically reduces the number of points and so misses out some of the buttons, but it seems to work fine.

2. Exporting the main elements of the page seperatly and more or less building a template using tables in Dreamweaver and placing the images exported from IR.

* I'm sure IR will handle these things better in future, it just seems that you get better result if you build the site in a dedicated HTML software package like dreamweaver or goLive.

Here is the site (well just a page at the moment) so far:

<http://www.clearworld.co.uk/cone/conerecords3.html>

Thanks People
Lee

[Don McCahill]

Re: it just seems that you get better result if you build the site in a dedicated HTML software package like dreamweaver or goLive

In my opinion, building a site in ImageReady is a mistake. IR is designed for creating web graphics, which are then incorporated into a site built in one of the programs you mention (or in my case, in handmade HTML code).

(Actually, I don't use IR much. I prefer Macromedia's Fireworks, but place it in the same position ... a creator of graphics, not of full pages or sites.)