Download Efficiency | Certified Macromedia Flash MX Designer Study Guide

As much as we like to fill our movies with eye-catching text effects and mind-blowing images and music, many people don't have the patience or the time to wait for big files to download over the Web. However, if you design your Flash MX movie with certain factors in mind, you can increase the download efficiency of your movie.

Sound Compression

One of the major factors that fattens your movie's file size is sound, so try to use it sparingly. If you do use sound, compress it as much as possible. Also, sync your sound to "stream," thereby forcing your Flash animations to keep pace with the audio. Moreover, a streamed sound never plays longer than the length of the frames in the timeline it occupies. If stereo isn't needed, use mono: It will cut your sound file size in half. Try to use the lowest sampling bit rate possible without sacrificing too much quality. Most of the time, end users view your movie on computers with inexpensive sound speakers , so big stereo sounds and high bit rates are just wasted .

Symbols

Another way to keep file sizes low is to reuse objects from the Library in Flash. If you have a forest scene, for example, convert one tree to a symbol and reuse that graphic symbol repeatedly to create your forest. Flash reads a forest of 300 trees the same way it reads a forest with 1 tree. In other words, Flash reads that tree only once, so the file size stays incredibly low.

Movie Loading

Another good way to improve download efficiency is to develop the movie in smaller pieces or SWFs as you create. ActionScript's loadMovie action will become your best friend. It lets you develop several smaller movies as opposed to one large movie. By using this approach, you empower your end users to load only what they want to see as opposed to waiting for an entire site to load. In order to load movies into your main movie, you have to specify a target location. To do this, you must designate the target's location area as a movie clip. You can also load a movie into a _level.

Finally, load important and crucial informationsuch as navigation and contextfirst, then load eye- candy animations and graphics last. That way users don't have to wait before gathering the important information.

Preloaders

A preloader is another name for a creative distraction. While a preloader plays, all your movie's contents load up so that once the movie has completed loading, it plays without interruption. The key thing to remember about preloaders is that they must remain simple and low in file size to allow for fast loading. By the time the preloader animation is finished, the rest of your movie will have successfully loaded.

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