In a Sprite track, QuickTime records and animates individual picture elements rather than whole frames. This may yield speed and filesize advantages for suitable imagery (such as most Director animations). The animation appears smoother than the GIF format, but still worse than the Shockwave version. Notice that the picture quality could be improved--with little performance penalty, since QuickTime is optimized for 16-bit color (the animation was created in 8-bit color to better accommodate other formats). Also, the current sprite-enabled versions of QuickTime (Mac 2.1 and 2.5, Win 2.5) do not support Director's ink modes (which were used to blur the hummer's wings)--this also may make the movie suboptimal. On the other hand, sequential playback could be made worse by turning off intraframe differencing--when off, this yields better random access to individual movie frames. The movie also contains a text track, which does not appear in the frame (it was disabled using MoviePlayer). It still appears as an index pop-up menu next to the movie controller, providing for quick random access to specific locations within the movie.
In a Sprite track, QuickTime records and animates individual picture elements rather than whole frames. This may yield speed and filesize advantages for suitable imagery (such as most Director animations).
The animation appears smoother than the GIF format, but still worse than the Shockwave version. Notice that the picture quality could be improved--with little performance penalty, since QuickTime is optimized for 16-bit color (the animation was created in 8-bit color to better accommodate other formats). Also, the current sprite-enabled versions of QuickTime (Mac 2.1 and 2.5, Win 2.5) do not support Director's ink modes (which were used to blur the hummer's wings)--this also may make the movie suboptimal. On the other hand, sequential playback could be made worse by turning off intraframe differencing--when off, this yields better random access to individual movie frames.
The movie also contains a text track, which does not appear in the frame (it was disabled using MoviePlayer). It still appears as an index pop-up menu next to the movie controller, providing for quick random access to specific locations within the movie.