Re: FLASH: Ensuring smooth playback

[Chris]

Joe Tait wrote:


> I recently finished a small movie (20k, 12fps, Flash 3), which when I play

> it back in IE 4.5 and Netscape 4.08 (this is on a MAC, btw), is _slightly_

> choppy (admittedly IE was smoother). Since this is a file reading off of a

> harddrive, it makes me worry that playback on the web will be pitiful.

>

> The streaming graph plot shows that I don't exceed the "red line", even on

> a 28.8 modem, throughout the entire scene. Most of the animation are

> composed of symbols, w/ a lot of alpha channels and scale motion tweens. I

> would say the most objects being animated at one time is 7. They are all

> white stroked objects with no fills, and there is one small paragraph of

> text that gets slowly revealed with a mask layer at the end.

>

> Is this the type of animation that would require a lot of cpu horsepower to

> redraw? What should I think about doing to ensure it plays back as smooth

> as possible?


all of this sounds pretty heavy-duty ... alpha channel tweens are a big killer

especially if there are 7 or so things being tweened at a time. even tho

vectors are smaller, they do take more power to effect than bitmap images ..

plus decompression adds to that. but this all said, it's hard to say what does

what. there is one particular scene on one website I made that chops running

through IE on a G3 300 ... the rest runs smoothly. Then I go home to my lowly

180mhz 604 and the same part of the scene runs way smoother through NS ... but

then chops through the rest. its a quick scene with motion, scaling and alpha

tweening w/sound f/x. But I'd say power of the machine determines a lot about

playback. I learned the hard way and had to re-do a site because I authored

the site on that same G3 300, which played fine ... then it just choked on

it's companion, a 9600 233 ... which odviously wouldn't meet the criteria of

matching the speed of our P166 low end test model.


sorry to blab .. hope it makes sense


Cheers



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