Our sample HotMedia will use a manual transition from the initial image and then play through the animation once and stop.
A likely scenario would be to create a set of images, then convert them to GIF images (this type of image would compress best with GIF file formats.)
The default GIF format is 8bit/256 color. The resulting HotMedia would be 11k and look like the following:
If one were to completely author this sequence using 2bit/4 color GIFs, the file would take up 7K and the resulting HotMedia would look like this:
Clearly, the 11k file is better quality.
What about a hybrid though? You can experiment with the transitional frames at lower quality, but keep the initial and final frames at the higher quality. This technique is especially useful for longer sequence HotMedia projects, where the user is not expected to browse the sequence.
Combining the 256 and 4 color versions, we get the following HotMedia, which is only 8K:
The lesson to be learned is that total HotMedia size can be adjusted after the experience is defined and the raw images are available. As is suggested in most tuning procedures, it is usually wise to complete the creative concepts before beginning the optimization steps.
* These recommendations are not intended as full discourse on image manipulation, but instead prescribe some common approaches to image file adjustments so as to improve the overall HotMedia experience.