Flash GIF animation (got transparency?)

[chuanist]

Stop me if you have heard this one but:

I can make two kinds of GIF anims with Flash in CS4:

1) smoothly outlined shapes on a colored background, or
2) awful, jaggy POS's on a transparent background

Naturally I am trying to make GIF anims with transparent backgrounds.

If I 'publish' a GIF anim it is jaggy with transparency.

If I 'export' a GIF anim it is smooth with a solid background.

I have configured the h3ll out of the 'publish settings' according to common sense and all the wisdom of the 'net and forums. So my question:

Has Anyone succeeded in making smoothly outlined GIF anims with transparent backgrounds? If you have and can tell me how you can name your reward.

Thanks,

Glen

 

[lucidmedia]

as a file format, GIFs only allow one of your 256 distinct colors to be set transparent... so soft transparency is impossible. You can try to minimize the jaggy-ness via dithering, but if you need to get smoother than that you should use another format.

Stop me if you have heard this one but:

I can make two kinds of GIF anims with Flash in CS4:

1) smoothly outlined shapes on a colored background, or
2) awful, jaggy POS's on a transparent background

Naturally I am trying to make GIF anims with transparent backgrounds.

If I 'publish' a GIF anim it is jaggy with transparency.

If I 'export' a GIF anim it is smooth with a solid background.

I have configured the h3ll out of the 'publish settings' according to common sense and all the wisdom of the 'net and forums. So my question:

Has Anyone succeeded in making smoothly outlined GIF anims with transparent backgrounds? If you have and can tell me how you can name your reward.

Thanks,

Glen

 

[chuanist]

Yes, that is true, but it is not the issue I am describing. If you want to know what I am talking about do this:

Make some simple anim using solid color shapes in Flash.

Export and Publish as I have described.

Run the anims in a web page and magnify them greatly. You will see that the smoothly defined shape is not anti-aliased. The pixels are after all quite small and they look okay. The same shape in the anim with transparent background is rendered differently, very blocky and jaggy with points larger than single pixels.

The rendering in the case of the transparent background is altogether different than the anim with the solid background. That is what I am interested in finding a way around.

P.S.: those who have trouble with the way text is rendered in GIF anims in Flash ought to apply

modify > break apart

to all text before exporting or publishing the movie as a GIF. This prevents Flash from making big rectangles and triangles out of the letters during rendering.

 

[damonjim]

try logobench.com to design the flash