Re: FLASH: Ensuring smooth playback

[John Croteau]

Hi Joe,


> 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.

There are two components to how fast an animation is going to play.

1) Processing power 

2) Streaming or the lack of it.

If your animation streams at a given rate it should playback on the Web

the same as on a hard drive if the processing power of the user machine

is same.


> 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?

Anything that involves a large portion of the screen at one time will

require more processing power and if not available Flash will slow down

or if using streaming sound, it will drop frames.

As always illusion is important. 

Do things more one at a time rather than concurrently.

This can give you a fast moving pix that appears to have things

happening all at the same time, even though only one thing is actually

being done at a time.

Processing problems are the same on the hard drive or the web. They are

affected by how fast the CPU and how fast and well the video card draws

the pictures to the screen.


-----------                               -----------------------

John Croteau

croteauerols [dot] com (mailto:croteauerols [dot] com)

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