Everyone: Yeah. I hear you all. The original of this was a color QuickTime I made from a Cobalt file. It looks absolutely gorgeous because it is a blue-glass cube and a graphite-colored jack inside and below. Note also that, on top of the cube when it gets to the right spot in its turn, you can see some reflections of lights behind it. I had used three different “theater-like lights” back there: R, G, & B, that are side-by-side so the reflection looks way-cool. Any registered Wikipedian who wants a copy of that color QuickTime file can contact me by choosing “E-mail this user” on my user or talk page. Unfortunately, I took the lazy way out and simply converted the original color animation to a smaller grayscale version, which I can see resulted in less-then-stellar results. As for pixel size, I might be able to boost that a bit since this is 810 KB; but there isn’t too much more room to go bigger since I use every trick in the GIF book to crunch this to as compact a file as possible. Besides, Wikipedia’s
current default width for still pictures is 180 pixels. So at 176 pixels for an animation, it’s hard to imagine a good justification for going much larger. Much larger, and load times would become excessive for any page that included this. As for color, sure, auto-play GIFs can be in color but they are limited to 256 colors and—I guarantee you—this kind of image would look like crap at 256 colors. The alternative would be a Theora animation but that requires the user hit a ‘play’ button. I believe the solution that is the best, all-around compromise (if I were to re-do the original animation in Cobalt), is to set the Cobalt background either much darker or much lighter. How see ye all? Near-black or or near-white background?
Greg L (
talk)
05:47, 18 April 2010 (UTC)reply
Everyone: Yeah. I hear you all. The original of this was a color QuickTime I made from a Cobalt file. It looks absolutely gorgeous because it is a blue-glass cube and a graphite-colored jack inside and below. Note also that, on top of the cube when it gets to the right spot in its turn, you can see some reflections of lights behind it. I had used three different “theater-like lights” back there: R, G, & B, that are side-by-side so the reflection looks way-cool. Any registered Wikipedian who wants a copy of that color QuickTime file can contact me by choosing “E-mail this user” on my user or talk page. Unfortunately, I took the lazy way out and simply converted the original color animation to a smaller grayscale version, which I can see resulted in less-then-stellar results. As for pixel size, I might be able to boost that a bit since this is 810 KB; but there isn’t too much more room to go bigger since I use every trick in the GIF book to crunch this to as compact a file as possible. Besides, Wikipedia’s
current default width for still pictures is 180 pixels. So at 176 pixels for an animation, it’s hard to imagine a good justification for going much larger. Much larger, and load times would become excessive for any page that included this. As for color, sure, auto-play GIFs can be in color but they are limited to 256 colors and—I guarantee you—this kind of image would look like crap at 256 colors. The alternative would be a Theora animation but that requires the user hit a ‘play’ button. I believe the solution that is the best, all-around compromise (if I were to re-do the original animation in Cobalt), is to set the Cobalt background either much darker or much lighter. How see ye all? Near-black or or near-white background?
Greg L (
talk)
05:47, 18 April 2010 (UTC)reply