If you come from a traditional video production background, you have probably heard of the golden triangle of production. You know the one: "You can have it good, cheap or fast. Pick any two." This triangle holds true in webcasting as well, but instead of good, cheap and fast, the points have been replaced with quality, speed and size. Each one is interdependent on the other two.

It's what's inside that counts
The image quality can make or break a streamed animation. Bland colors, chunky, pixilated pictures and dropped frames result in poor image quality. This is probably the number one reason why people stop watching a movie in the middle of the stream. Programs like Flash and Adobe Live Motion are perfect for the web, as vector-based animation uses up very little space, keeps color quality concise, and edges smooth. These types of animations also use low frame rates and thus can produce acceptable quality animations even on a 28.8 connection. A great example of 2D animation using vector-based animation is the God and Devil show.

As companies and individuals begin to experiment with streaming 3D animation, all of the same issues arise, but this time they are compounded by a few other headaches. Shading of a 3D object adds a subtle but needed range of colors to an object that can collapse into a grungy mess if compressed too much. The other component is polygon count. As the number of polygons increase in a streaming animated file, the longer one must render the image. If an interactive 3D character is needed, larger polygons can slow down screen redraws. To see an example of streaming 3D animation on the web, check out the Multipath Adventures of Superman.

One final factor to consider is frame rate, the lower the frame rate, the more jerky the image. A two frame per second 3D animation is going to look much less sophisticated than an animation that can be streamed at 30 frames per second.

Size does matter
In order to improve the quality of the image, stream speed needs to be increased, but this affects image size. Size, when talking about the Internet, deals with two quantities: physical size of the image and overall size of the file. Five years ago it was perfectly acceptable to stream an animation at 128x96 (about the size of a postage stamp), but today viewers want to see detail, color and motion in crisp, clear detail.

This is only possible when streaming files at much larger image sizes. Most end users of streaming media still have their monitors set at 800x600, so even a half-screen resolution movie will tend to look small. In order to achieve the rich detail seen on television or motion pictures, image size should at least try to achieve an image size in the 640x480 range.

Unfortunately there is a direct relation between image size and file size; the larger the image, the larger the file. With programs such as Media Cleaner Pro, bringing those file sizes down to a reasonable transmit size is possible. Content created by products from Real Networks, Windows Media, and QuickTime do make streaming video and animation possible, and the quality and size issues once again become an issue.