Re: FLASH: swf file

[Marc Hoffman (Dart Frog Media)]

At 05:37 PM 7/28/99 -0700, you wrote:

>Creating a whole web site is tough. hehe  I am on the planning stage and am

>not sure really if I should put a whole web site into one swf file with lots

>of different scenes on it or is there a better way to do this?

>

>Thanks for all the info

>

>Angie


Hi Angie and all,


There is nothing necessarily wrong with one large .swf. If it can be

designed to stream efficiently, it can be huge and there is no reason to

break it up into several movies.  Using multiple movies loses the benefits

of one library shared by all of your Flash presentation. This can be a

large price to pay. On the other hand, if there are large blocks of content

that the user can request in unpredictable order, using Load Movie may be a

good idea and may be worth having to reload some symbols in different

movies. Used in this situation, Load Movie allows different parts of your

presentation to be played without necessarily loading all parts.


Put another way, load Movie should not be used as a substitute for careful

engineering of the content stream. Optimize your vectors, use symbols as

much as possible, use bandwidth profiler and output reports to trim things

down and to distribute content so that it streams smoothly.


Even a relatively small Flash movie can choke up without correct planning.

On a 28.8kbps modem, trying to playback more than 2k of new content per

second can exceed bandwidth and create a bottleneck. On a related note,

trying to accomplish too much animation at once (for example, animating

large-area bitmaps) will also create choppiness, even when the entire file

has been downloaded to memory.  So the "long" answer is that Flash creation

requires lots of planning, testing, and optimizing.


It is not advisable to get into the habit of using scenes. Scene boundaries

force movie clips to reset to their first frame, and they interfere with

sound. Try to avoid relying on scenes. Keep your work well-organized with

plenty of labeled layers and frame labels as well, and you probably won't

even need scenes during authoring. If you really need scenes during

authoring, combine them into one scene prior to export.


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