CompuServe Messages

PMJI, but have you considered "hiding" the palette flash by using a brief fadein from black at the beginning? When all the colors are black, palette flashes tend to be rather invisible. Fadeins also look nifty. But if a fadein is unacceptable for your purposes, then there is no solution within the 256-color mode. Palette flash in 256-color mode is a function of Windows itself (or rather of the limitations of VGA cards — most take way too long to change more than a few palette registers at a time, compared to the Mac which can change all 256 palette registers during the vertical blanking interval when the electron beam is off the screen and headed back up for the next frame! You can demonstrate this by playing with the "PALETTE USING" statement in QBASIC under MS-DOS 5 or later). There is no way around it other than simply not using 256 color mode, but playing 256-color .FLCs in High or True Color mode will almost certainly have serious performance reduction unless the card has true video acceleration (as opposed to just Windows BitBlt acceleration). High Color mode (either 32,768 or 65,536 colors mode) can also result in a loss of color fidelity, since while it has more colors on-screen AT ANY ONE TIME than 256 color mode, 256 color mode actually has a larger color SPACE (6 bits — 64 levels — per primary, for a total of 262,144 possible shades of color). High Color mode is only 5 bits — 32 levels — per primary for 32,768 colors, or 5 bits each for Red and Blue and 6 bits for Green for a total of 65,536 colors. 5 + 6 + 5 = 16, or two bytes per pixel. But since High and True Color modes have no palettes, they cannot have palette flash. Playing back with Windows in those modes WILL eliminate palette flash, but at the cost of overall performance. If you're going to use those modes, you might as well render to .TGAs or .JPGs (use .TGAs with 16-bit .TGA mode enabled in the Render/Options dialog box if going to 32,768 High Color if you want smooth dithering instead of banding) and use another utility program to assemble them into a .AVI or QuickTime for Windows movie. QuickTime is superior. Why have only 256 colors if you're going to have to play back in higher modes anyway?