If you are a flash developer or motion graphic designer and you use flash as a tool, chances are that you may had stuck at some point where you cannot go further because your movie has eaten more bytes than you wanted. There are restrictions in the form of weight, animation length and frames per second and on and on. Here we will focus on banner weight and how it can be reduced.

Why it’s so necessary to optimize a flash banner. You may be wondering why I am saying so because you may probably know that many hosting websites impose restrictions i.e. 468×60 banner could not exceed 18 kb and so we keep our graphics less and animation short to achieve that. But there is one more dimension to this whole thing. In my viewpoint optimization is not only to reduce and degrade quality of graphics and keeping animation short but to effectively use them.

Before I delve further into this topic, I want to clarify that flash movie optimization is not entirely different from graphics/images optimization. In fact, it is a step after that. As flash supports bitmap and vector graphics, they can be manipulated with using their native soft wares. I will not describe this here because that’s different topic altogether. But before deciding on graphics you will use for your movie, carefully observe that what format would be best to represent your graphic. Deciding on whether bitmap is needed ot vector would be best, take informed decision. If bitmap is required decide on jpeg/gif/png. Each format has it’s pros & cons.

These are general tips to optimize a flash movie-

1. Whenever possible, use tweened animations, it takes less file space than a series of keyframes.
2. Complexicity can slow playback. Keep animation as less complex as possible.
3. Minimize use of alpha transparency, gradients, masks and tweens.
4. Use symbols, animated or otherwise, for elements that appear more than once. Symbols are stored once in file and may be referenced many times.
5. Use shared libraries to contain media elements common to several loaded movies.
6. Use simple vector graphics rather than bitmap images to yield better playback performance.
7. Limit the area of change in each keyframe. Make the action take place in as small as possible.
8. Break up larger movies into smaller movies and join them together using Load Movie action. Smaller files loads faster and uses memory more efficiently.
9. Reduce the amount of information in the first few frames of the movie to enhance streaming performance.

Now you should have a rough idea of how flash banner optimization and performance enhancement can be achieved. I will go futher and will tell you more with my next article.

Arun Tripathi
www.aruntripathi.com