Publishing

Bandwidth profiler

Pick the longest animation you created during the course, or some of the examples provided with Flash installations. Open FLA file and select Menu-Control-Test Movie. While on this screen make sure that Menu-View-Bandwidth Profiler is checked.

You may see the screen similar to our example.

Look at the left part of the screen – there is some essential publishing information is displayed like size of the file (ours is 164 Kb), duration of the movie – 15 sec.

For us preloading time is very important– it is said that for our example it’s necessary to wait at least 20 seconds before file will stream smoothly on the client’s machine with 56kb modem connection. For your file you may change a projected speed of modem at the Menu-Debug by selecting for example Cable setting. Our file needs only 0.2 seconds to be preloaded for the cable connection. It doesn’t mean that all file is loaded in this short time – it means that after 0.2 sec downloading of the content is done in advance – it’s going faster than displaying on the screen.

If you look at the Bandwidth Profiler you may identify frames where the largest “chunks” of information are downloaded. Usually the most space (and time) consuming are event sounds, bitmaps and complicated nested movies.

You may wish to revise your movie after analyzing the Bandwidth Profiler. One good idea is not to introduce symbols, images or sounds before the moment they are really need to be shown. If you place everything on the stage at once – you will need a longer preloading. In contrary if you distribute your content evenly along the timeline your animation will play smoothly even with slower connection.

Next