What is the difference between an animated gif and a flash animation?

?What is the difference between an animated gif and a flash animation?
Strictly speaking, Adobe Flash Professional is an integrated development environment (IDE) while Flash Player is a virtual machine used to run, or parse, the Flash files. But in contemporary colloquial terms ';Flash'; can refer to the authoring environment, the player, or the application files.The Flash files, traditionally called ';Flash movies'; or ';Flash games';, have a .swf file extension and may be an object of a web page, strictly ';played'; in a standalone Flash Player, or incorporated into a Projector, a self-executing Flash movie with the .exe extension in Windows. Flash Video files have a .FLV file extension and are utilized from within .swf files.





.Gif


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GIF (Graphics Interchange Format) is an 8-bit-per-pixel bitmap image format that was introduced by CompuServe in 1987 and has since come into widespread usage on the World Wide Web due to its wide support and portability.





GIF images are compressed using the LZW lossless data compression technique to reduce the file size without degrading the visual quality.





*GIFs are suitable for sharp-edged line art (such as logos) with a limited number of colors. This takes advantage of the format's lossless compression which preserves very sharp edges (in contrast to JPEG).


*GIFs are used for small animations and low resolution film clips.


*In view of the limitation on the GIF formation to 256 colors, JPEG is a more commonly used format for digital photographs. JPEGs can save information on more than 16 million different colors and use more aggressive, lossy compression which has a less noticeable effect on photographs than it does on images with sharp edges.


In circumstances where speed is more important than reduced file size, uncompressed bitmap formats such as Windows bitmap are more commonly used than the GIF format, since uncompressed bitmaps contain raw pixel information and can be displayed very quickly.


*The PNG format is becoming an increasingly popular replacement for GIF images since it uses better compression techniques and does not have a limit of 256 colors.


Read this


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While Flash SWFs are considered one of the more advanced methods for publishing animated and streaming content to the web, there are times when using an animated GIF for smaller, shorter animations would be more to your advantage. Here are a few questions to ask yourself when making the decision:





Does my movie require user input?


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While an animated movie in Flash may look exactly the same as an animated movie in GIF format, if you have any user options, buttons, interactivity, etc. those cannot be played in an animated GIF, as it's nothing but a series of static images. If you require the ability for user interaction, then a Flash SWF is essential.





Will the majority of my target demographic have the Flash player?


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If you're sending a message to a specific audience, there are certain characteristics of your demographic that may make them more or less likely to have the most recent Flash player (or any Flash player at all) on their computers, and more or less likely to be willing to download it. If you think less than 50% of your audience will have the Flash player or will be willing to download it, then you may be better off using an animated GIF; while Flash requires a plugin to play, animated GIFs will automatically run in any browser.





Does using Flash lower my file size significantly?


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9 out of 10, the answer to this question will be ';yes';. With simple graphics, vector-traced SWF files are almost always going to be smaller than sequences GIFs because of the way the images are stored and rendered. However, if your graphics aren't simple--say if you're importing detailed bitmap artwork into Flash and leaving it as a raster image rather than converting it to a vector image--it's possible that you may end up breaking even or even coming up with a smaller file using an optimized GIF.


Am I using audio?


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This is another major dealbreaker, like the requirement for user input. If you're using audio, you'll need to stay in SWF format, as animated GIFs are image-only. However, if you're not using audio, then the SWF format isn't really necessary, as both the SWF and GIF will accomplish the same ends in playing the soundless animation.








With those four major questions in mind you should be able to weigh the pros and cons of using SWFs or animated GIFs based on your specific needs and specific purposes.





Hope this will help!





Cheers:)What is the difference between an animated gif and a flash animation?
different extensions


gif would end in .gif


flas would end in .fla or .swf


so you view them in different programs
Well basically an animated gif is an animated image or picture.. flash animation is kinda like a cartoon or something... do you watch cartoons? you can do it in flash..
An animated gif is a stand-alone file that already works with all browsers. It is limited to 256 colors.





Flash is more like a video stream that you develop with high priced Adobe products. There are some low-cost Flash conversion projects that allow you to make FLASH from another movie source. People can view it, only if they install the free Adobe Flash Player. It might not work with certain versions of browsers. It works with millions of colors.





Good luck and Happy Computing!