Professional :: Balance Image Quality With Small File Size?
Aug 16, 2011
I need to first express that I'm a fully self-taught Flash designer. No one has ever sat down and tried to explain to me the DOs and DONTs about Flash. I have followed tutorials, books, and anything else I can get my hands on, but never a person. People of Flash seem to be very hard to find, in my personal experience.I am the most comfortable with Photoshop, knowing very little about Illustrator or Fireworks.That said, I have been asked to create a 45KB (yikes!) max file, rotating 3 .jpg images I created from other .jpgs given to me. The images are usually large, so I am given room to compress them for a 300px x 250 px stage.
However, these images are always my biggest culprit for my huge file size. I'll import them in, making them into Graphic Symbols, but nothing seems to prevent the enourmous file size.When given the raw images, I would throw them into Photoshop, make the files the correct 300x250 size. Then I have tried: saving the image at the best resolution in .jpg and .png form, and then I tried saving the images as low-as-I-could-stomach quality. I hardly see a difference with file size when they are imported into Flash and used.I was told to use Fireworks's Optimize function, which I did, but it made my .swf even biggerWhen I have my Flash piece all set up/animted as I want, but I need to replace the bitmap(.jpg/.png) photos, I will:right click on the bitmap to get properties, "upload" the new image to be used, adjust the Quality, having "Allow smoothing" unclicked.
I understand I should make as much of the graphics in Flash as I can, instead of Import, but I am primarily given photographs to use.Seeing what my previous peers have done is mind-puzzling, but they are not around, so I cannot ask them for their advice. Their files are under 45KB and look sharp and amazing:[URL]
I set my images at 60% quality JPG files out of photoshop which seems to give a very nice representation. I set up a site to take a full screen, so I expect it to be larger on a bigger screen then what I see on mine. I figured to keep every image actual size at about 25% bigger when the finlal needed size in the layout, so if the site is ever on the bigger screen then images have some stored resolution to be enlarged and accomodate an increase in size. So all of mine images are scaled at about 75%.
Is it a good practise or things don't work this way in Flash? Perhaps it is better to keep the images to 100% (rather than importing intentially enlarges images) but make the maximum quality? Or both ways kind of work out?
I am new to Flash CS5 and I have created a slide show. I am trying to reduce the .swf file size for faster loading. I have been trying to adjust the size using the jpeg quality slider, but it doesn't seem to function whether I set it to 0 or 100 or anywhere in between. Publishing always generates the same size swf file.
I made a preloader for my single scene movie and although the preloader is about 16k, when placed into frame 1 of the movie and tested, the frame is shown to have about 256k, which is larger than the movie it's loading. I've gone through all the files and made sure that export in frame 1 is not checked and made sure the publish settings also are set to export in frame 1.
My swf file is rather large, so I tried changing the quality settings and the publish settings, but nothing I do seems to change the size of the final swf.
I am new to flash & working on my first swf file for a website.Problem is I loose image quality after publishing & uploading to the website.Ive located the publish setting for jpegs & changed this to 100% but problem still exists.When I do publish preview with the flash program it looks fine.
I notice when I run animations in the flash player, the image quality because very pixelated and blocky when I enlarge the animation.
I need my website to scale to different screen resolutions, so this can be a problem. Is there any way to make images smoother when the flash file is enlarged beyond it's native resolution? I really need to know since my website has to scale to a LOT of resolutions.
I was wondering about MC and hey can help to lag a game out. I set up an advanced class system so i don't have to use MC to simulate walls, all i use isthe x,y,width and height. Well anyway since i don't need MC anymore I was wondering if there is a way to attach Graphics instead of MC cause a Graphics file size is relatively small than that of a graphic, I think. If anyone could tell me thats true and show me a way to attach graphics that would be nice. I haven't tried it yet but maybe if I exported the graphic from the library imihgt be able to call its name, but it doesn't have an instance name so im stuck.
I'm having a problem with importing a layered PSD file into Flash, an issue which i've read about in a number of forums but haven't yet been able to fix.
The content of the PSD file in question is numerous layers of line drawing which I am importing to the Stage and converting to keyframes in Flash. The layers have no white background and are clear but for the lines of drawing.
The problem I'm having is that the first layer of the PSD file imports perfectly, with its quality intact, but all those which follow it are distorted and jagged, and look pretty awful for some reason.
I have experimented with both lossy (set at 100) and lossless compressions to try and improve the layer quality, lossless is marginally better but not the best.
I am creating simple drawings in Power Point and them saving them as png or jpg files. I then bring the drawing into Flash using import to stage. The imported drawings lose some quality (e.g. straight lines appear jagged). Any way to maintain image quality when importing images into Flash.
I have recently launched a site for a client which includes an interactive flash element on the home page but it takes a long time to load (10-30seconds). I have followed advice from others about keeping image small and link movies rather than embed but still slow, the swf file is about 7.9mb which i thought was ok for the size of flash file. Does anyway else know where I have gone wrong whether it be the embedding or some other area.
I created a flash video with interactive menus using Encore.The .swf file played fine from my laptop computer.I copied the .swf file and its associated files to a micro SD card and tried to play it from a Samsung Galaxy Tab (7 inch tablet, Wifi only version) but it would not play.I searched the web and it appears that the Galaxy Tab will play flash videos off the web, but will not play them off-line (that is, stored on the device locally). I want to preserve the interactive menus.My goal is to be able to play videos with menus, off a small 7" tablet with a bright and contrasty display Overall, I liked to Samsung Galaxy Tab, but I returned it when I could not figure out how to play .swf videos stored on its local memory.
I would like to incorporate Flash animations into video editing applications but when I save the Flash files as movies the quality is not there (Flash affects fall off, trails and such). My swf files look great there is no lag and the motion is clean. How can I get swf file quality to video? What is create a Projector?
im following some suggestions to cut my flash website into a few sections to make preloading a bit easier. so all i want is to make a small round ring rotate as long as the file is loading. so i looked and followed a lot tutorials but all the preloaders tutorials are much more compliceted then i need. they all have persentige sowing, and a bar that is filling according to how much the file has loaded, and colors changing etc. so i tried to take from the tutorials wat i need for my simple preloader to work but i get stuck.i built the animation of the rotating ring, but i get stuck with the actions i need to make the animation work as long as the file is working. i called my ring animation "circularloader". here is a image of the page with the ring:
When I press command + option + enter, the graphics looks very good but when I look at the quick time mov I saved, its so bad. It's fine if I 'drag' the quick time window to the smallest but when I look at it in full screen mode, the picture is so bad... What can I do to improve the quality?
I have made a total flash site but the exported site is 50 mb!! Not a usable size, so I want to know how to make this site 'smaller'. there are a ton of flash sites on the www, so I must do something wrong.. What is the normal file-size for a flash site?
I'm trying to get a transparent image to fly in from the side. So, I *thought* I was doing the correct thing by moving the "symbol" off of the visible portion of the stage, and creating a motion tween to move it onto the stage. The motion works, but the quality of the image in general (and the text in specific) looks pixelated.Thus, I did a little bit of snooping, and everyone said that you should start with a bitmap. So I saved the image from Photoshop into .bmp format, and was able to set the properties to "allow smoothing" and with lossless compression. So far, so good. Now, as I expected, the transparency is no longer there...
So here's the question: how can I make this image retain its quality, still have transparency, and a motion tween?It seems like this is some set of characteristics that don't play well together, even though I see this type of thing online ALL the time.I tried "Trace Bitmap" to convert to a raster image, and tried to follow some suggestions online, but when I do "Trace Bitmap", it ends up looking like it has a bunch of grayish dots on the image... definitely NOT what I was expecting.
I'm coding in actionscript 3 - the functionality is: large image loaded at runtime. The bitmapData is stored and a smaller version is created to display on the available screen area (I may end up just scaling the large image since it is in memory anyway).The user can create a rectangle hotspot on the smaller image (the functionality will be more complex: multiple rects with transparency: example a donut shape with hole, etc)
3 When the user clicks on the hotspot, the rect of the hotspot is mapped to the larger image and a new bitmap "callout" is created, using the larger bitmap data. The reason for this is so the "callout" will be better quality than just scaling up the area of the hotspot.The image below shows where I am at so far- the blue rect is the clicked hotspot. In the upper left is the "callout" - copied from the larger image. I have the aspect ratio right but I am not mapping to the larger image correctly.[code].....
I am creating a flash image gallery, much like flickr. I need the fullsize images to dynamically change size according to browser size /resize. The original images are of various sizes when i load them. I have set the _quality parameter to "BEST" on the clip I load the jpegs into. It actually works pretty smooth, but in between when there is some sharp lines in the image, it looks awfull - the line being cracky and disordered.
I changed from using a text field to a textArea component and now the font size is much smaller.The original text field had the font size set to 10 and Arial, just like I think I am doing with the TextArea but it appears to be coming up at about 3/4 the size it was before.
Code Snippet: myTF = new TextFormat("Arial", 10, 0xFFFFFF,false); myText_mc.myTextArea.setStyle("textFormat", myTF);
How do I make a vector image smaller in file size than a jpg image? This sounds perhaps strange since vector in general is expected to be smaller in file size then pixel. But take this image for example: I can get this to about 8 kb if I were to use 'save for web' in photoshop (jpg / low compression). But then I thought I perhaps could get it even smaller by vectorizing it. But that resulted in an image of about 145 kb. Is vector not always better than pixel when it comes to file size?
I embedded some characters using embed tag in flash CS3(font.swf). 2 separate swf(a.swf,b.swf) loads the font.swf on runtime. These 2 swf are being called from a container(parent) swf. It looks find locally and not time consuming to load. But when I view it from a server, computer lags after a while....(all file sizes are relatively small.around 160kb). What needs to be done in order to prevent computer from lagging? Is it better to load font.swf not in separate swf but directly in container(parent).swf?
I am working with high image file . I have to work for iage more than 3000x6000 dimensional. Is it possible in AS3. In some blog i came to know that AS2 could not support more than 2880x2880. Please let me know if you have any experience about working in high dimensional image .
How to preload this: I've made buttons which loads external txt files into textBox (HTML render); Those txt files contains text and pictures, like <img src="..."> (HTML tags); Also, there are some links like <a href="asfunction:...> I've made preloader and it displays bytes total for txt files only. Is it possible to make preloader which will calculate the size of a txt file, and the size of image from image tags inside that txt file?
I am using the MovieClipLoader class to load a bunch of images, and I am trying to build a loader that has a single percentage for the whole batch of images. I need the.bytesTotalof every image prior to loading them, so that I know the total number of bytes I am working with to calculate the total percent of all images that have been downloaded.
My issue is that it seems to be loading the images in a generally linear way (loads all of the first pic, then starts loading the second pic, etc...) and .bytesTotal is returning as 0 for all pics that have not yet started loading.
Anyone know how I can grab the total bytes of each image prior to the actual download of the image?
How can a set the image size in the above code. I've tried inserting width and height parameters just after the image's path but an error is thrown. I would like for the image's width to be as wide as the dynmic text infoBox.informationText
Also the path to each image equals a variable called calledMarkerContent How could I set the img src equal to the variable called calledMarkerContent?
