Animating Isometric Characters

Hey Guys,

I am a bit confused here with the approach I should be taking for Isometric type games. Lets take the walk cycle as an example here. My artists are well versed with making and animating characters in 3D with software like Max, Maya etc. They are not very conversant with animating in flash. Under such circumstances, I am left with 2 approaches:

  1. Taking renders of the character in 3d, tracing them in flash and using bone tool/shape and motion tweens to animate the character. (Problem is that it is a loooooooooong process by itself.)

  2. Doing the animation in 3D and rendering out a sequence of pngs and arranging them (Problem is that it results in a lot of file size.)

Is there any other approach that I am missing out on? What is the common way of doing this? My game is for Facebook and hence the filesize needs to be kept in check.

Look forward to your reply. Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Abhishek