Re: setup.exe opening page graphic

[Warren Young <warren at etr-usa dot com>]

On 8/20/2011 5:16 AM, Corinna Vinschen wrote:
> Are GIFs always so low on colors?

Yes.  GIF is limited to a 256-color palette.  It's a hard technical 
limit of the format, and was one of the driving forces behind the PNG 
development effort.

Animation makes it worse because all the frames share a single palette. 
 This is why the first frame has green casts in the shadows even 
though, in the renders, frame 0 has no green: there's a fair bit of 
green in the overall animation, so the color quantization algorithm 
included some in the global palette, and that then happened to be the 
closest color when quantizing this particular frame's shadows.

I used ffmpeg to create that GIF animation, but that really isn't its 
fortÃ.  A lot of programmer brain power got thrown at the problem of 
improving GIF animation back in the bad old Web 1.0 days, before PNG and 
Flash took over the world.  Photoshop does a lot better:

	http://etr-usa.com/cygwin/logo/from-box/animation2.gif

The color casts are gone, the dithering is gone, and the frame rate is 
fixed.  Also, I went ahead and applied the background masks, which as 
predicted made the animation a lot smaller.

animation2.gif is about 1/6 the size of animation.gif, but that's still 
41% bigger than the MPEG-2 version and twice as big as the WMV7.  I 
think Photoshop's given us as much space savings and made as good a use 
of the limited box of crayons as we can reasonably hope for.

Given that, I'd still prefer that someone decide to take on the 
DirectShow challenge.  I don't think it would be much harder than 
getting a GIF animation to show in setup.exe using only the Windows API; 
I think you'd have to embed IE, which is also a COMmy mess.

> are they always running in a (much too fast) loop?

No, that's just a bug in the program I used to create it.  The new 
version linked above fixes this.

> Btw., I asked our legal dept about licensing implications due to using
> derived art from the DAZ models.

Thank you!