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About importing bitmaps

Importing bitmaps is similar to importing other types of media. If you import a bitmap with a color palette or depth different from that of the current movie, the Image Options dialog box appears. You must choose to import the bitmap at its original color depth or at the current system color depth. If you are importing an 8-bit image, you have the choice of importing the image's color palette or remapping the image to a palette already in Director. See Choosing import image options.

Director can import images with alpha channel (transparency) effects, which are 32 bits. If you reduce the image to a lower color depth, Director removes all the alpha channel data.

When importing bitmaps, you should always consider that they will be displayed on the screen at your monitor's resolution (generally 72 to 96 dots per inch). Higher-resolution images that you place on the Stage in Director may appear much larger than you expect. Other applications, particularly those focused on creating images for print, allow you to work on the screen with high-resolution images at reduced sizes. Within Director, you can scale high-resolution images to the right size, but this may reduce the quality of the image. Also, high-resolution images use extra memory and storage space, even after they've been scaled.

If you are working with a high-resolution image, convert it to between 72 and 96 dots per inch with your image editing program before you import it into Director.

Director supports JPEG compression at run time for internal cast members imported through the Standard or Include Original Data for Editing import options. A JPEG file imported with either of these options contains both the original compressed bits and decompressed bits. Once imported, the JPEG file decompresses in the authoring environment. The cast member size displays the member's size in RAM after it has been decompressed. The amount of RAM required to display a JPEG file is larger than its size on disk, so do not be surprised that your cast member size is larger than its original size on disk in the Cast Properties window.

Director takes advantage of compressed JPEG data at run time. The original compressed data bits are saved in a Shockwave movie or a projector (if the Shockwave compression option is on). If you edit the member within Director in the Paint window, the compressed data will be lost. An alert appears before the data is overwritten.

If the Shockwave compression option is on, Director also compresses bitmaps into the JPEG format. For more information about bitmap compression, see Compressing bitmaps.