Preparing Your Movie for Optimal Playback

When creating movies to show over the web, you face the issue of quality versus quantity. Higher quality increases file size, leading to longer download times and slower movies. You need to find a balance between the two (see the sidebar “Putting File Size into Perspective,” later in this chapter). Things that add to a file’s size include bitmaps (especially animated bitmaps), video clips (especially embedded video), sounds, multiple areas of simultaneous animation, embedded fonts, gradients, and the use of separate graphic elements instead of symbols and groups. Flash’s simulated streaming helps you find out where your movie is bogging down. The Size Report and Bandwidth Profiler reveal which frames may cause download hang-ups.

To use the Bandwidth Profiler:

1.	Open your Flash document.
2.	Choose Control > Test Scene (or Test Movie > In Flash Professional). Flash exports the movie and opens it in Flash Player.
3.	From Flash Player’s View menu, choose Download Settings, and select the download speed you want to test. The menu lists eight speeds, all of which are customizable. To change them, choose View > Download Settings > Customize . By default, Flash lists five common connection speeds—14.4 Kbps, 28.8 Kbps, 56 Kbps, DSL, and T1—with settings that simulate real-world datatransfer rates. You can see the settings in the Custom Download Settings dialog . To create a custom setting, enter new values, and then click OK. To create a custom connection speed for simulating playback over the web, from the test environment’s View menu, choose Download Settings > Customize. At its default setting, Flash offers choices for simulating five standard connection speeds. You can change the names and rates for these speeds in the Custom Download Settings dialog.
4.	From Flash Player’s View menu, choose Bandwidth Profiler . To view a graph of the amount of data in each frame, choose View > Bandwidth Profiler when a Flash Player window is open.