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#1 2009-09-05 15:37:53

NXTGeek
Scratcher
Registered: 2008-03-27
Posts: 100+

Video Animations and Alpha Channles

I have noticed that many times a short compressed video clip could be used in a project. I do realize that videos take up a lot of space, but a compressed mpeg file takes up much less space than a large collection of costumes.

I'm not quite sure how videos would be handled. Could they be treated as one costume, exempt with a time value? (IE which frame it displays) If so, "videos" could be used as a compact way to store animated images. It would reduce lag for the programming (when you click on the costumes tab in scratch, if you have about 20 costumes or over, it takes quite a while to load)

Adding this feature would mean that there would have to be either adaptations in the normal sprite editor, or the animations would be treated completely differently than normal costumes.
Obviously the video couldn't be too large because of scratch's 10MB (or was it 8MB?) upload limit.
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Along the lines of graphics, I noticed that scratch only supports a binary alpha channel...AKA its either completely transparent or completely opaque. Support of a full alpha channel would greatly improve the graphics of many scratch projects and would open whole new doors of opportunities.

There is one challenge among the others that arises. If you want animated images, and images with an alpha channel, how will you do that? .PNGs don't support multiple frames, whereas .GIFs do. However, .GIF images have an extremely limited alpha channel. The answer is found in image "strips." Basically, all of the frames in the animation are compiled into one long image forming a strip that contains all of the frames in that one still image. (Was I clear on that point?)
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I do realize that adding such features would probably raise more challenges. The ideas are good, but can they be executed?

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