Advice needed for stop-motion Flash site

[ross_h]

Hi there,

I'm pretty new to Flash and I'm running into serious swf file-size issues.

I'm working on a site that basically has stop-motion animation for a background. So there is a new jpeg in each keyframe. I tried to keep the filesizes of the Jpegs down (25% quality, but some of the animations are large so the swfs for some sections are about 5mbs! I'm not using actionscript so far, but would the stop motion animations run smoothly if they were loaded into keyframes dynamically (or would each one have to load and ruin the flow of the animation?!)

What size should I be aiming to get my swfs down to so that people dont have to wait forever for them to load?!

Do people still use 56k modems to view flash sites?

Here's a test one if anyone wants to see

http://www.rossharrington.com/bookDiy.html

I'd really appreciate some help as I'm at my wits end and the site is supposed to be live by next week!

Thanks,

Ross

[pyrophone]

Have you tried turning your stop animations into video, and using flash video instead? I don't have a ton of experience with that, but it seems like that might optimize things better.

[master_phat]

Screw 56k users. They either need to move or upgrade to better internet :P

Anyways yea, if your stop motion is already in video format somewhere then you can easily covert it to an .flv to decrease the size dramatically. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/video_guide.html
maybe that will help.

[ross_h]

thanks for the advice, I don't have a clue about Flash video, but it seems like a good idea, so i'll go and do my research on it... is flash video supported by most browsers?

[haam]

Screw 56k users. They either need to move or upgrade to better internet

heh, that's pretty ignorant. perhaps you could pay for all those people to make the switch, or maybe you could lay the fiber optic lines personally that don't reach many small towns and cities.


@ross_h - yes Flash Video (FLV) is cross browser supported. As long as you implement the FLV into Flash properly all the end user needs to view it is Flash Player.

You're going to need at least Flash 8 with the Flash Video Encoder (or a friend that can encode for you). You'll start by creating a regular movie (.MOV, .AVI, .MPEG) then use the Flash Video Encoder to turn your movie into FLV form.

Lee Brimlow at gotoAndLearn (http://gotoandlearn.com/download.php) has great video tutorials on Flash Video. You're going to need a FLV player (http://www.download.com/FLV-Player/3000-2139_4-10467081.html) to view them until he gets his site back up and running.

[master_phat]

heh, that's pretty ignorant. perhaps you could pay for all those people to make the switch, or maybe you could lay the fiber optic lines personally that don't reach many small towns and cities.

No thank you.

[haam]

then don't complain.

[CreationsCentre]

heh, that's pretty ignorant. perhaps you could pay for all those people to make the switch, or maybe you could lay the fiber optic lines personally that don't reach many small towns and cities.

Lol. Actually that's a pretty valid comment there! :)

[JPAG]

#7: He doesn't complain? He "just" say: "Screw 'em".. I kinda agree.. Like - we can't keep doing our website to be good looking in 800*600.. Maybe some doesn't have det resources to do so, but..

[glosrfc]

Screw 56k users. They either need to move or upgrade to better internet :P
For some, it's not an option to upgrade


heh, that's pretty ignorant. perhaps you could pay for all those people to make the switch, or maybe you could lay the fiber optic lines personally that don't reach many small towns and cities.

Well said

As for what you can do, if you're stuck with using jpg's try to optimise them as much as you can before you import them into Flash. Whatever you do, don't resize them once you've imported them either. The best optimising program I've ever used is NetGraphics Optimizer but I'm not sure that's still available although you might be able to pick up a copy from somewhere. http://www.quickerwit.com/company.cfm?p1=1445&p2=1&p3=2
I've usually been able to compress jpg's down to about 10k or less in size without any appreciable loss of quality.

You could also try setting your movie up to stream the content. In other words, preload the initial scenes (say the first 500kb) and then load in the next 500kb SWF while the first one is playing. You'll obviously have to keep a close eye on the Bandwidth Profiler to get this right but it shouldn't be impossible to achieve.

Another consideration is to break your background into the smallest possible section, convert it into a movieclip, then simply make it loop - rather than importing 100's of identical jpg's. You can also consider removing some intermediary jpgs depending on the framerate you intend to playback the movie - after all, the human eye doesn't see most of the animation and the brain is capable of filling in the gaps.

And why use jpg's in the first place? Can't you create the same kind of background using Flash's own vector tools?

Other than that, I guess you're probably looking at a video option.

[Pasquale]

No thank you. SOMEONE likes sparking arguments:egg:.

[master_phat]

#7: He doesn't complain? He "just" say: "Screw 'em".. I kinda agree.. Like - we can't keep doing our website to be good looking in 800*600.. Maybe some doesn't have det resources to do so, but..

Thank you for being able to interpret simple sentences correctly.

@ross_h: you got if figured out yet?

[glosrfc]

It might not have been a complaint - but it was an arrogant (and, as Haam pointed out, ignorant) statement nevertheless. I guess it's not just the sentences that are simple.

[DDD]

Me personally I dont really consider 56k users very much. They are a big minority these days, still out there but a minority. And most of them understand that they are light years behind the current technology, so they expect a wait. If you really care about those poor souls, offer and alternate route and a disclaimer. I wouldnt halt the presses for them tho. You are really onto something there with that style. If you have access to After Effects, you can compile your jpgs into a Quicktime (compressed) then compress further using Squeeze or flash videos built in Spark vid compression. I havent tried the cs3 video stuff but it should be better. I think in a long run you'll come out better with video.

[vstorm]

Importing th jpgs into Quick Time Pro and then exporting as an flv to bring into Flash is prob the easiest way. QT Pro is really easy to use if you are not a video editing person. The FBF animation is awesome! Another thing you could do, is make it a little smaller, and then just make sure the size of your jpg's are the same size @ 72dpi using Photoshop. I didn't have any problem loading it, so you are prob. ok. Did you import them as a sequence in Flash? Also, You might want to place some type of navigaiton on there, it took me a minute to figure out I had to click on the outer part, and that's only becuase I saw the hand, some people might not know that. It would look cool as an flv integraded into another fla. FLV's are awesome! You could customize your player to your cool FBF jpg's

[master_phat]

It might not have been a complaint - but it was an arrogant (and, as Haam pointed out, ignorant) statement nevertheless. I guess it's not just the sentences that are simple.

Arrogant? Sorry, for being honest. You're right though. My sentences aren't the only thing that are simple. So are everyones convictions...simple and full of emotion but no logic.

http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0703/

Thank you google.

Ross: my advice is that if you are doubtful about peoples' connections you should put Google Analytics on your site or something similar that presents you with statistics of your visitors' connections, browsers, os's, etc. Then, you will know the largest group in your statistics who use fiber optics, broadband, or 56k and can make future sites accordingly. To save you time, it's broadband.

here are mine:
http://img264.imageshack.us/img264/1047/statsmp5.jpg (http://imageshack.us)

[ross_h]

Thanks!

Its meant to look kind of clunky and lo-fi, but I've got to make it work smoothly behind all that. I'm looking at turning the stop motion JPEG sequence into a quicktime in After Effects and then turning that into a FLV using flash video encoder. Its starting to work but I've a bit of tweaking to do and some tech stuff to get my head around.

here's the link to the holding site

http://www.baconinstead.org/

I'm trying to get the actual site finished and up by thursday 10th may so fingers crossed!

Thanks again,

Ross