Scratch

Zangooser · 2012-04-20 17:21:53

I'm sure most of you have uploaded at least one project, right? And you've probably noticed the "compress sound and images" checkbox in the corner of the upload popup.
I've been uploading a lot of projects that contain art recently. When I look at them on Scratch, they're fine, exactly what they looked like when I made them. When I upload them here onto the Scratch website, it looks as though they've been converted into .gif, or maybe even .jpg. So, for the sake of my art, I want to know: does compressing sound and images affect the quality of my artwork?
Thanks to whoever answers.

sparks · 2012-04-20 17:36:22

The compression system tries to make your sounds an images use less virtual space (bytes). It uses something called a compression algorithm.

To simplify what happens, You do a drawing, and the computer represents that drawing on your screen as 1+1. When you upload that drawing to the site, Scratch tries to make it smaller by replacing 1+1 with 2. The result is still the same, but the computer can't always tell very well what the un-compressed version of 2 was. Was it 1+1? 2 - 1? Who knows! So when it comes to dispaying the image on the site which has been compressed, the program doesn't have as much information as it needs and so some quality is lost. MP3, for example, is a very compressed song file type, but the compression algorithm is so good you barely notice it. GIF is (IMO) not very good at displaying images as they were, but IS very small.

In answer to your question, yes, compression will affect your artwork, though if you only use colours from the 256 colour pallet you won't notice any difference as those are all the colours that the gif format can display.

I hope that wasn't too technical, feel free to ask more questions!

Further reading: GIF files

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#1 2012-04-20 17:21:53

How does compressing images and sound affect my game?

#2 2012-04-20 17:36:22

Re: How does compressing images and sound affect my game?

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