When talking about animation, the first image format that comes to mind is GIF. But did you know that GIF is not the only one supporting this feature? MNG is closely related to PNG – actually it grew from PNG. MNG was developed to fulfill all the capabilities of the PNG format that were not included in its original version – mainly animation. When PNG was designed, animation was not much used, but still, development of the animation-supported version of PNG started shortly. Here are just a few of the advantages of the MNG format:
– Way better compression than GIF animation
– Integration of both PNG and JPEG-based images
– Support for transparent JPEG images
The MNG format combines in itself the best features of the PNG image format as well, namely:
– Alpha channel support
– Gamma and color correction for cross-platform consistency
– Ability to store some copyright information
The most common application of MNG is the slide show. Since MNG incorporates not only the concepts of frames, clipping, and user input but also all of PNG’s features, a MNG slide show could include scrolling, sideways transitions, fades, and palette animations. MNG animation is different from GIF. MNG supports nested loops meaning that it can be specified in which direction the image should move. It indicates that a previously defined sprite should move somewhere else in a zigzag path to the right, then up, then left, and finally back down to the starting position. ImageConverter Plus makes it possible to save to the MNG image format. When converting images to MNG, you can choose from saving the image as it is; as a multipage file, or several separate images. You can also control compression level from 0 up to 9 which is the highest number possible. Please note that ImageConverter Plus provides support for the VLC – very low complexity version of MNG.