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Message:: [QUOTE="RonSanderson, post: 4781816, member: 77413"]We seem to have opinions all over the map. To those who get dizzy when looking at my animations, I apologize. To those who like them, thanks. But there are tradeoffs and choices even in simple photos, and I think a dedicated application could resolve them to everyone’s satisfaction. The existing image formats still leave a lot to be desired. If you animate using a GIF file you are limited to 256 colors per frame. To make a GIF an algorithm will try to find the best match of the color of each pixel. This is complex - the 256 colors need to be optimally computed so the overall divergence from accurate color across each pixel is minimized. Even an 800x800 image has 640,000 pixels, so we are potentially trying to reduce 640,000 unique colors down to 256. If the image is bigger, there are likely even finer gradations of color to be reduced. A GIF, therefore, is a poor representation of the color subtleties on a coin. In an attempt to reduce file size, the image is often downsized, so actual detail is sacrificed as well. My compromise is to post a GIF and individual still photos that have higher resolution and better color accuracy. There are better and newer formats, but they are not universally supported in all web browsers - and for that matter are not file types that can be uploaded to CoinTalk. I would have explored these to get better, smaller animations, but it seems pointless if they cannot be shown. Finally, there are tradeoffs about how the animation shows the coin. I have gone with a tilting period of 1.1 seconds, using 9 frames showing for about .12 seconds. I chose these values after some experimentation. I felt that tipping a coin or slab in hand took about a second, but in practice one second was just a little too fast. Nine frames gives a smooth animation, and gives an illusion of continuous motion of light across the coin. But those are parameters that satisfy my brain. Then may not satisfy yours. A dedicated app could use any type of data file it wanted to. I can see tagging each photo with the angular direction of the light sources. The data file could contain a number of frames, and use an advanced data compression algorithm that only stores the differences between each frame, to keep the size under control. Lets say you took 36 pictures at 10 degree intervals or even 72 photos at 5 degrees. A phone app could detect the phone tilt and display the appropriate picture that is lit from that angle. (In reality there are probably 3 fixed light positions and the coin and camera rotate together underneath them. That’s what I do.) Unlike the frames in a GIF, the app would not need to time how long to show the image. That is determined by how fast you are tilting the phone. When you tilt to a new angle, the image is replaced. As a result, you can choose how fast the frames replace each other, so you would not have the dizzy feeling you may be feeling from my efforts. Of course, if you control the contents of the file, you can do away with limits of color compression that plague GIF files. The dedicated phone app can show photos of any resolution - it just shows them in quick succession. For my part, I am glad to see this. I am posting animations here, in part, to see if we can raise our expectations. I can only go so far myself. My employment contract as a software developer includes standard boilerplate that all my innovations become my employer’s intellectual property. Even though designing a new file format and writing a phone application would be a lot of fun, I could not market or distribute it.  I needed someone to take my animations to the next level, and I think DLRC and NuTilt have done that. That makes me happy to see. I’d be even happier if I have had some influence on showing what could be done. But that would be gravy.[/QUOTE]

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