Topic: File Sizes! AAHH!

I am making an Interactive presentation for a real estate company and I was only on the second scene when I came to realize that my exported SWF was at 202K! The presentation includes alot of pictures and things like that and I was wondering if we could compile a list of ways to keeping the file size down. And what would be an acceptable file size for a flash animation on the web?

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Good stuff overall with one correction:

graphics - don't precompress your images, all that's going to do is lower the image quality in your final SWF. attempting to keep the number of colors in your image will affect your final file size to a certain extent, but to save as a JPG is like making a copy of a copy for your final SWF; Flash does JPG compression when it exports an swf so you don't to have an image compressed to start otherwise the image quality is being lower twice. importing as a PNG is your best bet, that also allows you to save an alpha channel if needed.

additions:

symbols - use them let's say you have 10 little slimies in a scene that are all very similar but they're all different colors. you have two options:
- make 10 different colored slimies
- make one slimy and make it a symbol, then modify it's color/tint in Flash

using just that symbol means that your user is downloading a file that has only one slimy in it instead of 10 slimies, which can turn into a significant savings in file size.

hope that helps...

Chris


KAIROSinteractive

What do you mean by "an Interactive presentation"? Will it be web-based, or will it run from a computer or CD?

Ini's phrase "modular" is one place I'd start looking to trim size. I'm assuming that the photos account for the bulk of the, uh, bulk. You didn't mention sound, but that can get prety hefty fast. Obviously I have no idea how your presentation is set up, but see if you can make the photo component (and sound if that applies) a separate, self-contained swf that the main movie can call with a loadMovie command and can dismiss with an unloadMovie action. That takes a lot of the weight off the main movie, and the presentation appears to start up much faster because it doesn't force the viewer to download all the content up front. Sound tracks set to stream also have the advantage of starting to play after just a short buffer delay.

Again, I don't know how your movie is structured - this may not be a practical suggestion for what you have done. But if you can, there are distinct advantages to a "component" type organization. Also can make it easier to debug and update - you don't have to keep opening and compiling one huge movie.

This presentation will be used on the web for a little while then it will be sold to area realtors on cd's for marketing.