[thelist] Flash help and a thanks

[H. G. Quinn]

Aardvark makes great points about studying up on preloading and MP3's, and
brings up the issue that graphics created in Flash's native vector format
will be more compressed by far than any bitmapped art.  I agree with him
that about breaking up the movie, too.

Your main movie is the "regulator", and the "sub" movie it calls can be
designed to call on server, bandwidth and local resources in a "just in
time" fashion.  The largest elements of the presentation will be the sound
files (no matter what their format), so anything you can do to fracture them
and call them in sections, will give you more control over the flow of data
and the movie rendering times.  Flash will stream sound, but there can be
sound-to-frame sync probs, due in part to the nature of downloads, and due
in part to Flash buggies.  Using sub-movies will compartmentalize the
frame-to-sound relationships, and give you more control over sync'ing.

Since we all like sites that give us something useful to see, do or read in
6 seconds or less, that raises a...

Question: who will be holding what weapon to whose head to make that someone
sit there through a presentation that long?

Answer: the Wise Webster will educate his or her client as to how multimedia
really works over the web, and win the OK to restructure/ rearchitect the
presentation so the user can call segments of it on demand, which will avoid
the possibility that no one will ever wait long enough to view the
presentation.

aardvark wrote:

> > From: Warren <warren at warrenworld.com>
> >
> > ... And now we move on....I have a client who wants a flash movie
> > published online that will be the equivalent of a souped up PowerPoint
> > presentation. There will be a narrative in the background with
> > different text, photos, etc. appearing on screen during the narrative.
> >  There is 14:30 minutes of narrative and then 7 minutes of
> > trestimonials. This has been provided on disk as a wav file (216 megs
> > worth) that I will need to downsample, etc.
> >
> > My question is...should I attempt to make this one movie, or should I
> > break it up into smaller movies (this is what I'm thinking) that call
> > each other at the end of the previous one. Of course the main issue is
> > how long it takes for viewers to actually see something on screen.
>
> wow, since you plan to have them view this over a connection of
> some sort (not off the disk), then i would recommend reading up on
> pre-loader movies, the MP3 compression, and everything you can
> do make that work... having one movie start loading another while
> it's playing will help things out a lot... but there will still be gaps
> between movies...
>
> i did a similar project once... 15 mins, background music, dozens
> of narrations, mostly vector images... the higher quality version was
> 50MB... the ultra-low-res one was 10MB... cutting voices out got it
> down to 3MB with the bg music...
>
> there are some great Flash sites out there that can help, most of
> which i can't get to right now (system trouble, and i can't risk
> crashing Flash right now, which is what i'm doing, because of a
> deadline)...

Cheers,
--
Heather Quinn
hgquinn at attglobal.net
http://pws.prserv.net/windyhill