Hey All, hopefully someone can help me. I’m designing a website which has one main MC in the timeline. This main MC totals about 650 frames with text and pictures for each page (65 pages). This when published into a .swf, was 172KB. However, the download time was huge, almost 45 seconds. The intro page works fine, which I then use a loadMovie to bring in the main .swf with navigation bar, etc. So, I took this large .swf and split it into 3 smaller .swf’s, 50, 111 and 85KB, for each. Now when live online, this too, seems too large and almost 30 seconds to download.
Any suggestions? can I optimize in any way or should I just again split the 3 movies into maybe, 5 movies? What is the ‘best’ size for each .swf that will be published online? You can see the link yourself at www.erfanidmd.com.
hey dave-
here are some ideas to help–basically, you are on the right path by splitting off mcs or swfs and loading them–your ‘problem’ is probably more in the fact that you have a lot of animation going on, and it seems that you are doing it ‘frame style’ with a lot of tweens, etc. not a lot you can do to optimize this, except for look at your compression settings in publish and see what happens when you crank it down a bit. (you could also perhaps look at removing or simplifying some of the animation–you’ve got a lot going on in your movie!)
as for breaking it up, you’ll want to make sure that your larger swfs are being preloaded, so that a user doesn’t have to wait for an animation to load after they’ve pressed a button…
some tweeking around should help you get this into a more manageable file size–my general rule is to keep the main swfs to less than 80k–you could go higher, but not much–some people think 170k is fine, but they’re usually the ones who have broadband/t1 and have never used a 56k dialup connection!
good luck,
-mojo
thanks for the advice. You are right, the front intro page does have alot going on, I’ll thin it down. the rest of the pages are very static though, with few pictures and tweens. However, I do understand what you are saying about pre-loading the larger .swf’s but where does that happen? in the main timeline, I assume? first or second frame? In general, about 80k in file size sounds good to me, I will do that. thanks again. by the way, you have a cool site. dave.
hey dave-
afa preloading, the idea is to have the content movies loading into a MC that is either hidden, or has a blank first frame, while the user is looking at your main page, ie. you give them something to look at while the mcs are loading–without seeing your movie, it’s hard to tell where they should go, but generally, the first frame of your main scene (after the intro), is a good place…
-mojo
ps. thanks for checking out my site–as usual, it’s in a state of permanent construction…
