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Blog Home > Flash Coding and Tricks
One of the biggest sources of frustration for Flash designers is the incredibly stingy filesize limits imposed when developing online advertising. Most publishers limit the initial Flash animation to 40K (i.e. absolutely nothing) and will allow a subsequent polite download of another 60K (i.e. a little more than nothing).
Sage Vann, one of our team of star Motif Flash experts, has put together some helpful hints on reducing filesize for advertising. If you know any others, drop us a line.
Avoid raster graphics: Attempt to stay away from raster graphics and bitmaps. Anything that you can build in flash as a shape will have a much smaller footprint than loading in a bitmap (png,jpg,gif,... ) of the same object. Which leads us to ...
Use vector fonts whenever possible and don't ever use fonts in a bitmap if you can help it. Fonts in flash are stored as vectors that are interpreted at runtime, just like a shape, so they have a much smaller footprint than other fonts. Also, fonts in bitmaps will generally have more aliasing than vector fonts and so the use of fonts from inside flash will not only reduce file size but also increase readability.
Use empty movieclips to hold duplicated content. Simply load in your content from the library and only have one copy resident in the swf.
Use tweens to do simple motion as much as possible rather than have several new objects on different key frames. This allows flash to only keep one object and move it around the stage and transform it rather than creating new objects on each frame.
Compress movie:Choose the option to compress movie from the publish settings. This can have a major impact on file size, please test the creative to assure that this compression doesn't damage the quality of your creative.
Use shared libraries (both font and object) for ads that have parent-child files. Using a shared library allows you to store ALL the duplicate library objects from several swfs in a single swf, thus reducing overhead from duplication. Further reading: Shared library discussion from Macromedia's KB.
Compress images before importing to flash, this guarantees that you have the image quality you want as well as the file size you expect. Also, for files that are largely outline or cartoonish use .gif whereas for photographs you should use .jpg for the best quality. Further reading: An explanation of the differences in image compression.
Remember, reducing filesize is more of an art than a science, so you may need to use different techniques on different projects.
Posted by Ari Paparo on January 31, 2006
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