Hour 21. Optimizing a Flash Site

What You'll Learn in This Hour:

• How to reduce the file size of a movie without affecting quality

• How to remove unnecessary special effects to improve performance

By now, you can draw, animate, and design a site that's both interesting to look at and easy to use. Of course, you can always run either Test Movie or Publish Preview to get an accurate idea of how a movie will play. However, there can still be a marked difference between how a movie plays on your computer and how it plays when viewed by a web audience. Not only do connection speeds vary, but each user's computer may perform differently. The result might be that although a movie instantly plays smoothly on your computer, it takes a long time to download and then stutters as it plays on someone else's computer.

Optimization involves two unrelated issues: reducing a movie's file size to speed download times and improving playback to ensure that the movie plays equally well on different computers, regardless of processor speed. This hour investigates both issues in an attempt to ensure that your movie downloads quickly and plays well on all your users' machines.