USING IMAGE COMPRESSION

The Tapptoons Animation Studio has provision for storing the bitmaps produced for animation projects in a compressed form using either JPEG compression or TToons compression. There are some important technical problems to take into consideration before choosing to use compression with the Tapptoons Animation Studio.

JPEG compression will make it impossible to merge animation levels therefore it shouldn`t be used for compressing animation produced using scanned Line Art or video grabs converted to Line Art-style bitmaps which is what happens if you choose the Black and White Video camera grab option. If you choose to grab images in colour (as with puppet and model animation) they will be ideally suited to JPEG compression. The programme will only allow such camera grabs to be compressed using JPEG compression whereas with black and white grabs you can choose either JPEG or TToons compression.

TToons compression is a form of Run Length Encoding for 24bit colour bitmaps. It is NOT suitable for compressing colour camera grabs because the resulting files would be larger than the original bitmaps. Nor is it a good idea to use it if there are large areas of gradient fills being used on animation levels. However it is very good for compressing Line Art scans or drawn frames which use mostly solid colours.

If you want to use compression you need to make that decision at the beginning of your project. If you decide to include it later, after saving your initial work and restarting the programme, only the bitmaps created after that decision will be compressed. The original scanning session will remain uncompressed.

Final Scenes will always be compressed using JPEG compression because these images are not usually modified any further.

To set the programme to use compression you can access the form required via the Compression menu item on the Main Scanning and Editing Form.

If you later decide against compression you can use the same form to turn it off again.

TToons compression can take a lot of time to carry out depending on the complexity of the bitmaps but decompressing the bitmaps on restart is very quick. JPEG compression is fairly quick for both compression and decompression and is always set to 100% quality.

Generally, if you can avoid using compression it is probably best to do without it but if you find you are running out of hard drive space as you progress with an animation project it may be a help.

 

 

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