I have a little gif animation here. If I added 300 frames I could probably smooth it, but I was wondering if a Flash animation would be a lot smoother? I've never used Flash at all and have no software, so I would be a complete novice wondering where to start. Is it worth my while learning it, do you think?
Those of you experienced with Flash - would it definitely produce better results for my particular animation? Would there be any problem using it as a background image as it is now? Any thoughts on bandwidth or accessibility?
I hope that's not too many questions! Thanks for any help you can give.

Thanks nick. So I take it you mean that Flash would definitely produce a better animation for my site, but it won't be so accessible.

that's something new I found out. I do think that nick is a remote case though(no offense intended). Most people stick to their flash activated.

I does eat some bandwidth but a swf (flash - in newbie vision) would make your animation smoother helping you emphasize your idea. Also you could add a small preloader if your animation jumps in kb size.

If you take this into account, I recommend SwishMAX as an alternative for simple, straight froward animation. It's easier to use as opposed to flash (personal opinion) in acheving those simple effects for your animation. A place to start learning how to use swishmax could be www.pixel2life.com

The percentage is so low. I remember reading 2-3 years ago that Flash was installed 97.7% of the time.

Do both, while exporing in HTML with Flash 8 you'll have de possibility to check the user flash player version with Javascript ... if the user doesn't have the flash player then you'll display your gif animation. Make sure your flash animation is exported in Flash 6 so more people will see it.

Loop Digger, are you not seeing the continuous up-down animation?

Um, some things have changed within the past year regarding the element. Not only were the object and embed tags not being used in standards-compliant ways, but also, now, IE now forces a user to click on any Flash content BEFORE it will start playing. See here. Because of that, best practices is to use the customizable SWFObject Javascript in order to produce a solution that is not only accessible, search engine friendly, but also the most robust in terms of cross-platform, cross-compatibility. See here. On top of that - have you really checked out the percentages of pre-Flash 7 Linux browsers out there? Unless your site is a Linux developers site, you're not going to find that. More than likely, based on Mouldy's link, they'll be dealing with Internet Explorer more than 90% of the time. And of that 90%, IE has come with Flash pre-installed for about 3 or so years now, especially on newly purchased Windows systems.