.importing svs/pngs animations or making a movie from them and importing it?
Are you hitting speed or reliability issues? How do you define ‘effective’ ?
If you can provide a bit more detail about what you’re asking that would be helpful.
Spritesheets can be effective if used properly (and if the animations don’t take a lot of frames). You can combine them with either CSS (http://blog.teamtreehouse.com/css-sprite-sheet-animations-steps) or JavaScript (http://www.williammalone.com/articles/create-html5-canvas-javascript-sprite-animation/) in which the latter offers more control on events and other functionality.
Animating in Hype though would be your best bet I guess. My experience is that these animations are better scalable and offer more copy-paste linience when used in different layouts.
But as Daniel mentions: what is it that you exactly want to do?
performance…if the audience will be able to play content without hick
ups…im worry that if the animation is too long it would create problems…