Trace Bitmap vs Bitmap

programming flash
1

Hey guys quick Flash concept question. Does have regular bitmaps in your site in Flash bog down the site? I mean will the site run smoother if everything is ocnverted to vector using trace bitmap? In my case, it’s not big pictures or anything, it’s small little buttons or whatnot, but I would like to know if it is worth losing a bit of the bitmap quality to trace it.

Thanks!
-brad-:evil:

2

I thought that it would run smoother too, but it actually bogged down my animations a bit and actually increased my file size as well.

But that was with complex images, I’m not sure about simple buttons.

From what I know, the trace bitmap is only good if you plan to build something that needs to be rescaled.

3

I allways trace my bitmaps when I need them to be pixelaccurate. Using gifs/jpegs, even without smoothing tend to get a bit deformed or blurry. With a line of 1px in a bitmap, sometimes you see it, sometimes you don’t. When you trace it, you’ll see it…

tracing big / detailed jpegs can result in big filesizes and slow processing, so those I’d leave as bitmaps…

4

if you’re animating a bitmap, it is much less cpu intensive than a vector.

for example, scrolling big blocks of text in any way involving friction or acceleration is some of the most intensive stuff in flash since it has to render each vector point as it comes in view.

5

OK thanks guys for the info. Sorry on the slow response but I’ve been on vacation.

Thanks!
-brad-:evil: