I am trying to work with an animation sequence in Processing. I currently have a sequence of pngs that I am loading on setup, then advancing through the sequence on the draw loop. This works fine in terms of playback but for obvious reasons this is using a lot of memory. From what i understand the images are stored uncompressed so if i have a 15 second animation sequence at 300x300 at 60 fps with alpha channel, then that equates to 300 x 300 x 15 x 60 x 4 bytes per animation sequence. Don't quote me on that though, I might be completely wrong. Regardless, its a lot of memory to use for each animation sequence and I'm a bit anxious about loading this all in. However I also understand that loading each image in on every draw frame will decrease playback performance.

So I was just wondering if anyone else had similar experience and could recommend any best practices. I've seen a few threads on using a quicktime movie with an alpha mask too. I havent tried it but it could be an option. I'm also drawing these images in openGL too so I could store images in the GPU memory too.