Movies and Animation

Including Movies and Animations on your web pages are fairly easy. Finding good uses for animated material is much harder. Where animated material is the purpose of the web page, movies are content. But this is not usually the case, and animations slow download times and distracts users from the content and purpose of the web page.

Animated GIFs

Netscape 2.0 and Internet Explorer 3.0 and upwards support an extension to the GIF format called GIF89a, which alows you to create animated GIF pictures:

Animated GIF images are one of the easiest formats for the end-user to use: if their browser supports it, they will show properly, if not, only the first frame will show (or they will get a broken image). They do involve a little work for the webmaster: special tools need to be used to construct Animated GIFs.

Animated GIFs are embedded in web pages like any other GIF image:

<img src="kang.gif" border=0 HEIGHT=25 WIDTH=25>

One good automated tool for building Animated GIFs is GifBuilder, a scriptable utility which can assemble animated GIFs from seperate GIF files.

There is a very complete web site called GIF Animation on the Web which discusses almost everything to do with animated GIFs.

Finally a web site with some of the best examples of Animated GIFs I have seen is the Animated GIF Artists Guild - worth looking at just for the pictures.

Movies

The weak point of Animated GIFs is control- they don't give the user any control, and they don't give the Web master much control. Also, they are fairly unsuitable for use with large animations and they are frail- they often stop and won't restart without a reload or

Quick Time movies are the high tech solutions. Quick time movies can be served to a web browser and played using a web browser plug-in. Plug-ins for all platforms are available at Apple's QuickTime web site.

The user does need to have the plug-in installed, but if they don't they will usually be prompted (and guided) by the web browser to download the appropriate plug-in.

At its simplest a quick time movie can behave like an animated GIF:

" HEIGHT=32 WIDTH=32 AUTOPLAY=true CONTROLLER=false LOOP=true>

<EMBED SRC="stairways.qt" HEIGHT=32 WIDTH=32 
					AUTOPLAY=true CONTROLLER=false LOOP=true>

But with a minor modification the user can have controls:

" HEIGHT=56 WIDTH=32 AUTOPLAY=true CONTROLLER=true LOOP=true>

<EMBED SRC="stairways.qt" HEIGHT=56 WIDTH=32 
					AUTOPLAY=true CONTROLLER=true LOOP=true>

Or the movie can play...quite differently:

" HEIGHT=56 WIDTH=32 AUTOPLAY=true CONTROLLER=true LOOP=palindrome>

<EMBED SRC="stairways.qt" HEIGHT=56 WIDTH=32 
					AUTOPLAY=false CONTROLLER=true LOOP=palindrome> 

For definitive information on using QuickTime movies in webpages see The QuickTime WebMaster's Page. For lots of example movies see the Quicktime web page or Rich Bockay's Movies Page.