Help required with Flash project

In Flash 6 (or MX) you can import the AVI by going to File > Import. Then choose quality and frame rate options etc and Flash does the rest.

All you then do is go to File > Export Movie, select more file options and you're done.

Using the file you posted, I did a quick convert... I'm just now uploading for you to have a look at.

Trouble with that is that you have to have Flash6!!

Quote: Originally posted by The Webmistress
Trouble with that is that you have to have Flash6!!

I haven't checked in other versions. Have you?

http://www30.brinkster.com/rgareddy/talisman.swf (92KB) is what I've done with the AVI.

Thanks, I haven't checked, I'll do that later when I'm on my own pc. I get this message when clicking on your link - HTTP1.1 STATUS 403 Remote Access to this object forbidden This file cannot be directly accessed from a remote site, but must be linked through the Brinkster Member's site.

Trust Brinkster to do that.

Sorry, I'll have you another link in a sec.

http://www30.brinkster.com/rgareddy/talisman.html

Cool! I'll have to have a look at the other versions (4&5) to see if you can do the same on there

Hi Julia,

I squeezed the file down to around 70k, stopped it from looping also.

http://www.electricmountain.com/talisman.htm

Cheers,

TonyMontana

hmmm. I looked at the animation and honestly I would just redo the thing from the beginning. There is no way a simple animation like that should be 70k. If you don't have that font to work with, you could try the trace bitmap option in flash. I am sure that animation can be cut to probably around 10k or less if it was all vector.

You can't import avi's into Flash 5, and if you could, you'd still end up with tons of keyframes if you used trace bitmap.

A few extra k in this case doesn't matter because the file will start streaming immediately on just about any modem connection.

TonyMontana

Well. I got a little interested to see how small it would be. So I went and did it myself. I didn't use the trace bitmap thing. I just used the brush to trace over the "Spirit" word and then just redid the whole animation. The "Talisman" text turned out to be Arial, just squished a little.

http://www.cadeh.com/variousjunk/talisman.html

It may not be exactly like the avi file, but its a whopping 2.23K. Now that is nice.

Tony,

You said "a few extra K don't matter because it will start streaming right away."

The thing only lasts for like 3 seconds. Kind of defeats the purpose of streaming.

You were right about the keyframe thing. You get just a bunch of keyframes when you import, but if you look at the animation you can tell which parts are basicly static and which parts are doing the animation. The only real trick for this thing is the little "s" to the big "s", the rest is just simple tweens. So I wasn't talking about doing trace bitmap on each frame, just the last frame so you could get the "spirit" text. I should have clarified.

Tony,

You said "a few extra K don't matter because it will start streaming right away."

That's true, because as the 70k .swf is streaming very small amounts of data per second, someone on a slow modem connection could watch it right away. Flash files start playing immediately, regardless of their size.

As far as rebuilding the animation from scratch, yea, of course that will yield a smaller file size. That's cool you did that, looks like the workaround is not necessary.

TonyMontana

Thanks guys