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Thread: flash gurus please help - processor intensive problem

  1. #1
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    flash gurus please help - processor intensive problem

    my client commissioned me to make a piece which is 800x600 and full of 800x600 bitmaps. i know, problem off the bat. but we (THEY) decided to try it out anyway. the piece is a very linear movie, no interactivity, with masks moving over these huge static images -- about 35 of them (images) in total. i've taken great care to do everything i can to minimize processor effort -- i am not moving the images at all, performing fades by fading flat color over them (instead of fading the image itself -- does that help?), i resized them all perfectly in photoshop before bringing them in (as png's -- which, in my testing, produced the smallest output image by a 75% margin over jpeg. !)

    well, it's about 5 minutes long. and it crawls. the frame rate is at 24, i can't go lower and have it look smooth (lots of fancy text animation too.) i'm trying to find a way to make it work on a computer with an average processor. i know it sounds rediculous, but it's a huge (fortune 50) client and we need to explore all avenues before revisiting the concept.

    something i noticed is that the animation (which is currently all just one movie) - starts off fine on all machines, and becomes bogged down on some, only later. thus the solution i'm looking at is to break the animation into tiny little .swf's, and load and unload them. this would require fancy footwork to make it appear seamless, and im not even sure how to do it. but i'm wondering if someone out there can tell me if they think it will make a difference for the processor, or if there are other solutions i should consider?

    if you need to see the piece, please let me know. i thank you for your wisdom in advance, and look forward to any help you may have.
    thanks

  2. #2
    curmudgeon swampy's Avatar
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  3. #3
    An Inconvenient Serving Size hurricaneone's Avatar
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    Well, as you already noticed, your images are probably too big. As for the other elements, moving text, fading, etc., Flash might be able to handle all that, but you have to be kind to the user's processor. Move only one or two things at a time, remember that tweening alphas uses much more memory than regular, no-alpha tweens, and you have to take into consideration that cleanly booted machines (with lots of free RAM) might run the piece just fine, but if the viewer has a few apps open, even the best machines might get bogged down. Oh, and of course, don't let this monster stream in, make sure it's loaded before playing.

    I'll go as far as to say that you already know what the problem is, you just have to find a better balance.

    Stand by for emergency synapse rerouting

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