Minimizing lag

i have created a presentation that synchronizes with music, it is 480x360 and works fine on my computer.

however we need to hook it up to a projector and so gonna use a notebook, but the flash file kinda “lags” on the notebook (which is probably less powerful than my PC) and so the presentation doesn’t synchronize with the music too well. anyway to work around this? (other than setting the quality to low)

also, if possible we shld put it full screen. this would definately make it real slow (i’ve got quite abit of swift3d things in it). Anyway to reduce the ‘slowness’? or perhaps fill the background with black or something.

thx

without knowing the specifics, here are a couple of things that may help out.

  1. syncing music. if you have the music on the stage and it’s set to stream, it should stay in sync. if the machine is indeed slower, flash should start skipping frames if necessary in order to keep the animation and the music in time. playback will be jerky, but it should still be in sync.

  2. scaling the movie to full screen is a processor killer. it sounds like you don’t necessarily want the movie to scale up, you just want to screen to go full screen. if you put FSCommands on your first frame you’ll get that effect. do a “allow scale = false” and a “full screen = true”. the entire screen will fill (no matter what your resolution is) with your flash movies bg color and the movie will stay it’s original size and be dead centered within it.

the problem now will be that anything that goes beyond the stage boundries will still show. you could either put all of your layers under a mask, but that’s not processor friendly either. the way i’ve done it is to create a black box (or whatever color you need) that’s 1280 x 1024 and center it vertically and horizontally on the stage. then punch a hole in it that’s the size of your movie. put that shape on it’s own layer and put that layer at the top of your timeline. you’ll basically covering anything beyond your edges, but your movie will show through the “hole” you’ve cut out. i’ve attached an example for you.

i hope this helps.

great, thx for the tips. I can’t give you an immediate reply as to whether it works out cos i won’t get to try it till tomorrow. Sounds like it’ll work, tho :slight_smile:

[edit] uh…how do i set it to stream?

yeah, let me know if it works.

creat a layer called “sound”. create a keyframe that you want your music to start on. in your properties pallet, there is a pulldown for sounds. here, you’ll select which sound you want (assuming you’ve imported them). under that is a pulldown for sync. select stream.

the thing you need to know about the stream setting is that the sound plays as the playhead moves across the frames. you’ll need to make sure that you’ve given that sound layer enough frames for the whole song. if you have, you should see the waveform in the layer itself. you’ll also notice that you can “scrub” the playhead, ie, move it back and forth and you’ll hear the sound as it moves.

i usually stream my music for presentations so i can sync animation to the sound and it works great. for other sound uses, using the actionscript sound object is the way to go.

let me know if everything works out.

alright, thx alot for your help :slight_smile: