Efficient way to load large image sequences for animation

Issue

I have 4 image sequences (png format) that I need to use for my animations. Each sequence is about 50 frames long and each frame is about 300x300, so I have something like 30 MB of resources to load. What's the most efficient way to load them to avoid memory leaks? Should I go for xml drawable animations or there's a better way?

I don't need to display all of them on the screen at the same time. Only one animation at time will be displayed.

Solution

Maybe is a bit late :) but I hope this can help other users. At the end I've solved it with a simple loop which loads an image, draws it and destroy it.

        int frames = 50;

        //LOADING-REMOVING NEEDED FRAMES
        //set animation range
        i = currentFrame % frames;
        //frame to cache
        frameList.add(BitmapsLoader(i)); //custom function to load a specified frame from res
        if (frameList.size() == 3) {
            //frame to draw
            canvas.drawBitmap(frameList.get(1), left, top, null);
            //frame to remove
            frameList.get(0).recycle();
            frameList.remove(0);
        }

This keeps the memory allocation stable, no matters how many frames your animation is. Obviously it costs more on CPU, as we're not pre-loading all resources but we keep loading them at each frame. Despite these facts, my app is running smoothly. Tested on a Samsung Galaxy S3 and on a Galaxy Tab 4.

Answered By - leota