“Smart” compression. What is it?

“Smart” compression is a new feature that was added to FlashSpring Pro 3.0 to streamline the conversion process. It optimizes the size of your presentation striving to provide the highest quality of image content.

Images usually are the most frequently used type of multimedia content of the presentation. As video and audio files, images in many cases can significantly increase the size of the generated Flash file and they also have high quality requirements.

Images can be stored in Flash format with “Lossy” or “Lossless” compression. “Lossy” is the most convenient for photos and realistic images since this compression type allows decreasing the image size up to 10+ times with insignificant quality losses. However, the “Lossy” compression causes visible artifacts on diagrams, sketches and other drawings. That’s why “Lossless” compression is better because it provides high level compression for them without any quality loss. So the both types have their pros and cons.

Since presentations usually contain various types of images there is no best choice of the compression type – you either lose in the quality or the size.

In this case “Smart” compression is what you need! The unique iSpring “Smart” compression technique analyses each image’s content, automatically determines its type and chooses the best way of saving it in Flash format. This helps to keep the quality high and the size small!

If small size of the output Flash file is much more important for you than the quality and “Smart” compression is not giving you an appropriate result, you can choose the “Lossy” compression. This type is more suitable for publishing presentations on web among users with low speed internet connection.

If you would like to keep the original quality of the photo and the final Flash file size is not important for you, choose the “Lossless” compression. This type is suitable for the distribution of the presentations via CD or DVD.

We suggest choosing “Smart” compression all the time since “Lossy” and “Lossless” are appropriate in special cases only.

Presentations often contain animated GIF images. “Smart” compression gives you an additional option for optimizing of the animated GIF images size by applying “Lossy” compression to them. It’s enabled by default which is good in most cases.

We are constantly working on making iSpring Pro better and we’ll appreciate any feedback.