Operation Manual

Working with Graphics, Animation, and Multimedia 75
 To reduce file size, reduce the number of colors in each image, and
save as a .GIF file using the lowest acceptable bit depth your paint
program will allow.
If all this talk about image formats and bit depth has landed somewhere
slightly over your head, we have two suggestions:
(1) Spend some time with a good paint program and experiment with
the techniques introduced here.
(2) Point your Web browser to the suggested links at the end of the
chapter. You’ll find a wealth of advice and examples to draw upon.
Multimedia
Considering all the cautionary advice here about reducing file sizes to
achieve acceptable load time on home-based Web browsers, a foray
into multimedia is clearly not for the faint of heart! Although WebPlus
9 allows you to insert both audio and video files—and will even embed
the files in the original site to facilitate your efforts—from a design
standpoint this feature should be regarded as rather experimental.
WebPlus can incorporate a wide variety of audio and video files such
as QuickTime, MPEG, RealAudio, and RealVideo, besides the
“generic” Windows media types (.WAV for audio and .AVI for video).
There are actually two sound playback options—background sound,
where a sound loads and plays automatically when a specific page is
first displayed in the visitor’s Web browser, and linked sound, triggered
by a mouse click (for example on an icon or hyperlinked object).
Linked video works like linked sound.
These days, chances are your target visitors will be able to play media
in any of the supported formats. But unless you’re sure they’ll have
high-speed connections, file size is still a significant barrier. For
example, a .WAV file for speech content consumes about 10K per
second, and a compressed .AVI file for a postage-stamp-sized, 10
frame-per-second movie video without sound uses at least 35K per
second. If you want an audio track along with your movie, add the two
numbers together. MPEG compression can reduce file size
significantly, but many Web visitors will still have to wait before that
ten-second video clip knocks their socks off. If you (and/or your Web
visitors) are on a local network or have extremely fast Internet access,
however, the fact that audio and video are basically file downloads
should not pose a problem.