Flash Tip: Reducing Flash Movie Filesize

From Adrien-Luc Sanders, former About.com Guide

The great thing about advances in Flash animation is that we can produce more detailed, complex animations. The bad thing? Those more detailed, complex animations can reach astronomical sizes, which can be troublesome even on broadband. (Take it from someone who still gets annoying lag on YouTube videos despite a T1 connection). There are two ways to reduce filesize for FLVs and SWFs before publishing, though.

Open the File-->Publish Settings menu. Under the Flash tab are two settings you can change. The first is "Compress movie;" with this checked, Flash will do its best to reduce excess data on publishing.

The second is to reduce JPEG quality. JPEGs/bitmap images are often the cause of large file sizes; reducing quality can often drop your file size exponentially. There's a JPEG quality slider that's set at 80 by default; you can use the slider to lower the quality, or enter a number in the field to the right.

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