hey, this is my first post here… i’ve been working on a webpage contained enirely in flash for a while and everything was going great until i put an image that i drew in flash in the backround. the image was not reallly that large but nevertheless, the second i did this, the movie started to lag horribly. i tried increasing the framerate, but it didnt work, it still lagged… then i sat down and thought it out… i have four people in this backround image… each is their own symbol… within each symbol, i made a symbol for each one’s body, then i made one for each one’s head shape, one for each one’s hair, one for each one’s eyes, and one for the glare on each eye… i thought to myself “hmm… that makes 20 symbols all contained within one backround symbol… that could quite possibly be the reason why my movie lags so much…” anyway, i broke apart all of the images and finally, i had one symbol… i then had to add the eyeglares and i went over the images with a paintbrush set at black with 30 percent transparenct for a shadow effect… however, my movie continues to lag and this one image is still 50 kb +… coulkd someone please help me with this? it’s a pretty good image and i’d really like to hve it in the backround but i cant stand the lagging… is there any way to compress the image? (i drew it in flash so it is a vector graphic)
thanks
Ciao*
Derek
There’s an easy solution, but one which requires some work.
Movie clips have a lot of properties and stuff associated with them. Find places in your movie where they don’t need to be movie clips. Sometimes you just have to have them be movie clips and I don’t know what you’re using them for. Go through the animation, and where you don’t need them to be movie clips, select a keyframe for the peice, and using your instance panel, change the instance from Movieclip, to Graphic. You can always change it back at a later time. This will free up quite a bit of processor speed.
Then there are alpha’s. If your movie is bogging down, look to alpha levels, especialy on gradient fills, and imported raster based images. alpha is the biggest culprit for sucking up frame rate speed.
Probebly it’s just a large quantity of movie clips as you thought.
oh, and Welcome to Kirupa. Post often, any questions you got, and if you think you know an answer, help out where you can… well at least don’t be afraid too. We’ve only got a couple of sharks here with any teeth.
i’m actually kind of ahead of you… i already went through and made them all graphics… my “test movie” said that it was exactly the same size as when all of my symbols were movieclips… also, it still lagged… so i went through and broke up m symbols… i cut the remaining graphic and pasted itinto a new symbol… so i was left with only one graphic symbol containing three layers… it is still humungous and it STILL lags… The only possible thing i can think of that would make it lag is the way i added my shadow effect… i took the paintbrush and put the alpha to 30% and drew over the places that i thought needed shadow… i would take them out but they make the picture look better and i kinda like them… if that is the cause, how can i keep that same shadow effect without having lag? i’ve been to plenty of flash sites that dont lag, yet have much bigger/more elaborate drawings than this… a copy of my picture can be seen at
www.geocities.com/parisderek/Jon.swf
also, if anyone has any animation suggestions, please give them… i’m making a webpage for my band, scintillation and i need advice, as soon as i get this whole lagging buisness sorted out, i’'ll post a link for the site (at which point you all can tear it down with <hopefully> constructive criticism)…
thanks
Ciao*
Derek
Well… the change to graphics, instead of movie clips will not reduce file size no… it will however increase framerate.
I see a number of gradients in the eyes. Those might be affecting it too. Probebly it’s a combination of all these things.
My question to you is this though. It’s a still picture as far as I can see. What exactly is being sluggish?
in my page, i have ten buttons that react on mouseover and a random effect where little fireflies kind of fly everywhere and everytime i put the graphic on, the random fireflies start really really really jerking around, and the same with the buttons… i’m beginning to think that it might just be my computer… maybe it wont lag when i put it online… oh, one more question… the picture alone is about 50 some KB, is that normal or is it bigger than it should be?
ciao*
Derek
ahhh… you may just have too much going on at once. What are the fireflies? do they contain alpha gradients? How many are there? And finaly, what is the processor speed and memory of the machine that’s viewing it? Does it have a video card with extra ram?
You’re probebly going to just have to settle for less though… often that’s what it comes down to. 
You know what - my site does the same thing! Well, when I view it at work, it jerks between frames and increasing the frame rate makes no change to it at all. But when I view it at home, it looks fine. My processor at work is 500 megs while the one at home is 950. I think that might be it. I thought it might be that some of the objects contain too many lines or something and the processor can’t handle it easily.
ok thanks,
i think i’ll just leave it how it is and if it stil jerks around after i put it online, then i’ll scale it down abit…
thanks again…
ciao*
Derek