To improve the Web delivery (reduce the file size) of this animation, youneed to do a little fine-tuning. This process was covered in the Lesson 1 and is veryimportant if you want the movie to play smoothly and you don't wantyour audience to suffer through a long wait. When you use sound, youcan modify the Rate and Compression settings in the Export Moviedialog. Experiment with these settings until you get acceptable soundquality with the smallest possible file size.
These settings will get you the smallest file size, but the poorestsound quality. You have to balance which is more important for thisanimation.
If you find that you're unable to reduce the file size enough to streamproperly, you can insert a few extra frames and assign a series of actionsto display a loading message - "loading ..." message and use the same actions strategically to stallthe progress of the movie at a natural resting point.
This section of the movie will act as a "wait" section. At the lastframe of the wait section, insert a keyframe and apply a Go To and Playaction that will loop the movie back to the first keyframe of the waitsection (so that this section will loop indefinitely).
Next, assign an If Frame as Loaded action to the first keyframe of thewait section and give it a frame number that corresponds to the amount ofthe movie you want to be sure is loaded before continuing. Within thataction, insert a Go To and Play action that will skip past the wait part ofthe movie. This will force the movie to jump out of the wait section once the specified number of frames have loaded.
And that's it! You now know the basic skills that make a Flash Master.But remember: You don't create great Flash animations by bombarding yourusers with each and every one of these skills all at once. Stellar Flashanimations come from the elegant implementation of the rightfeatures. Many of the animations on Animation Express use onlythe most basic Flash techniques to showcase exceptional content. In fact,adding buttons and complex actions would only spoil many of theseworks. When you need sophisticated interactivity, go ahead and utilizeevery feature you need. But make sure you do it with a light touch,something that only comes with practice.So get to work!
There are a lot of excellent resources out there to help you learnmore about Flash. Here a few of my favorites:
