One of the true strengths of Ulead's COOL 3D imaging program has always been its ability to create colorful, eye catching animation. However, effectively using these cool animations on the Web has sometimes posed a problem, due to the limitations of the GIF file format. One issue Web animators run into is color count: Even though COOL 3D is capable of using up 16.7 million colors, the GIF file format limits animators to 256 colors. Another issue is file size: GIFs simple don't compress as well as we'd like them to compress.

This is where Macromedia's Flash file format enters the picture. Flash is capable of handling the 16.7 million colors that COOL 3D uses, and can compress images significantly better than GIF. Combining COOL 3D and Flash gives us the proverbial best of both worlds: Animations that contain more color than GIFs, and animations that download faster than their GIF counterparts.

Until recently, it was reasonable to have some concern about replacing GIF animations with Flash animations, since Flash animations require that a Flash plug in be installed in your user's browser. However, given the most recent statistics on Flash plug in distribution, we've reached a point where this should no longer be a concern. At the time of this writing (October 10, 2000) Macromedia's web site reports that there are over 281 million Flash enabled browsers worldwide. You can read more about Flash plug in market penetration in Macromedia's Flash Survey White Paper.

Using the Flash file format with COOL 3D requires that you have installed COOL 3D 3.5 or having COOL 3D 3.0 installed and that you download and install the free Flash Output Pack from Ulead.

Creating Flash in COOL 3D

Once you've installed the Flash Output Pack, there are no special steps required when creating your COOL 3D / Flash animation. In fact, once you've experimented a bit with Flash, you may feel comfortable with adding more color and detail to your animations, given the extra color and compression available in the Flash format.

As always, you should save a copy of your animation using COOL 3D's *.C3D file format (by clicking File, then Save), in case you want to make any changes to the animation at a later time. When you're ready to export the animation to the Flash format, click File, then click "Export to Macromedia Flash (SWF)", then click "with Bitmap" or "with JPEG".

Bitmap versus JPEG Export

The "with Bitmap" option produces file sizes that are larger than the "with JPEG" option. If you need lossless compression and / or alpha channel transparency (such as for a file being distributed on a CD instead of on the Internet), select the "with Bitmap" option. This option converts each frame of your animation into a ZLIB compressed bitmap with an alpha channel (which is very similar to a true color PNG file), and then packs the information into the Flash format.

If your file is going to be placed on a Web site, you'll probably find the "with JPEG" option to be the perfect combination of quality and file size. When choosing this option, you'll have the chance to tell COOL 3D exactly how much JPEG compression should be applied to the animation as it's packed into the Flash format.

The default options of Quality = 80 and Subsampling = YUV411 are always a good place to start. Once reviewing the Flash file, which will have a *.SWF file extension, you can decide if the file needs to have more of its original quality intact or if it needs some additional compression.

It's important at this point to remember some fundamentals of JPEG compression: When adjusting Quality, keep in mind that levels of greater than 90 can cause a huge increase in file size with little or no detectable improvement in quality. On the other hand, levels of under 60 usually cause too much compression to be applied to the file, resulting in an unacceptable loss of quality. For best results, keep the Quality set between 60 and 90.

The "Subsampling" option allows you to squeeze some extra compression into any given quality level. Subsampling works by averaging color data from neighboring pixels, in order to store that data in less space. The "None" option applies no Subsampling, the "YUV 422" option applies a moderate amount of Subsampling, and the "YUV 411" option applies the heaviest amount of Subsampling.

Given the significant improvement in file size that can occur with YUV 411 Subsampling, this is best option to try out first. If you find that your final image contains too much blurring around sharp edges (such as the borders between text and backgrounds) try adjusting the Subsampling to YUV 422, and if necessary, experiment with using no Subsampling.