FLASH: Speed vs. Size (was:getting a bit confused !)

[Adam Bruce]

>I and others have many examples of things on the Web with 3 levels of

>Nesting. Check out the Score where I use 4 deep nested Movie Clips.

>That is graphics nested inside a Movie Clip which is nested inside a

>Movie Clip, inside another Movie Clip,  which is inside a Movie Clip on

>the Main stage.

>

>The same animation plays the same when it is a simple 2 deep nested

>Movie clip even on slower computers.

>

>-----------                               -----------------------

>John Croteau                       


John,

     I'll start off at the begining and basicly cover some stuff I cover 

in my Flash class.  When constructing a movie, as it gets more and more 

complicated, you'll discover you have multiple ways of showing the same 

animation.  In the end though you're generally presented with the option 

of making it small (File Size) and slow (Frames Per Second) or big(File) 

and fast(Frame Per Second).  Tweening and Nesting are two things that 

decrease size but increase processor overhead.  By Nesting one tween in 

side of another it does give you more flexibility to move pre-existing 

animations on stage But eventually it slows the proceesor down.  AS an 

example of this I have a Throttle linkage Assembly I did for an E2 

Hawkeye training CD.  IT has multiple  tweens as pushrods actuate bell 

cranks and idlers to move the Rudder assembly from STBD to Port.  I 

would show this animation to you but I know you refuse to look at 

anything on my website so I'll give you an exmaple easier to visualize.  

Imagine you have an animation of a finger starting off at 90 degrees 

rotating up to 180 degrees and back to 90 degrees. you did this as a 

tween, you then attach this symbol to a duplicate until you get a whole 

chain of fingers that spiral in like a spring and unwind like a chord, 

all the while Nesting one inside of the other.  Once you get about 4 

levels deep it starts to bog significantly.  By moving the entire 

animation out of the symbol and onto the stage you significantly 

increase filesize, but the computer no longer has to rememebr multiple 

over laying tweens, and thus your frame rate increases.  If you wanted 

to go one step further to increase speed, select the tween frames, 

select "insert Keyframe" to convert the tween frames to actual key 

frames, remove the tween, and you get the same effect with half the 

proceesor overhead (But increased file size of blank tween frames vs 

keyframes)  This is particularly evident on shape morphs with large 

fills, however it significantly increases file size.  With the E2 

Hawkeye Rudder Lesson we tried the linkage twenty different ways to try 

to increase frame rate, but the only thing that worked was moving 

animations out fo the symbols and onto the stage. The final product was 

deemed unacceptable "boggy" so we converted the whole thing to an AVI 

(Which is a shame as the final SWF file was 150 KB while the AVI was 45 

Megs, OTOH it was delivered on a CD-Rom, so it was probably beter as an 

AVI anyways).  I work with Flash on a daily basis for both Military 

Contracting and Telecomunications training software, and my typical 

movie has Nested symbols sometimes as much as 10 and 15 layers deep.  We 

try to avoid using these as much as possible because they tend to bog 

significantly despite being simple and small in file size.  It's just 

alot of different time lines and tweens for the computer to try and keep 

track of at one time.


-Adam


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