I'm re-designing a website for a hotel, and the owner wants a flash movie on the home page - not an entire splash page, thankfully, but a big banner. The graphic designer doing the flash made something that was over 1MB, but says he's going ot optimize it to make it smaller. My question is when will hte flash actually start to play? The designer says it will begin as soon as it loads the first frame, and then if it's on a slow connection it will just play slowly as it downloads more of the movie file. Is that true? I'm hoping that users will see the rest of the page and won't bail out even if the flash animation takes a while to load. Any comments? P.S. The website is in my sig, but that's the old version. If you're interested in seeing what I'm talking about, the new versio is under development at http://200.23.19.41:8081
Don't know much about that, but if you don't want it to move slow you could make a simple preloader. Lots of tutorials on google.
Flash starts to play as soon as Frame 1 is loaded. If the connection is slow, the movie will play slow and choppy. That's why you always need to have a preloader on anything large. BTW, I'm not sure why that would be over a MB in size. I have a feeling that those may be 300dpi images they use in a brochure or something. If they drop that down to 72 or 96 dpi, the file size will really go down. I wouldn't think that clip would be over 100k.
ThirdChair - Thanks! That's really good info - what I really needed to know. I will definitely get onto the graphic design guy to make sure he reduces the file size. Magnus and zolink - I appreciate your ideas. The graphic designer said he could put a preloader on there, but to me I think I really prefer to have it start as quick as possible, even if it's sort of slow and choppy. If it's going to do any good with our site visitors, it has to do it in the first couple of seconds before they decide to leave! I don't want them to just see a "Loading...please wait" message, at least they can see "Welcome to Paradise", and start fading into the first image. I really appreciate your info!
A preloader doesn't have to be a text message or intrusive. The best are the ones that gracefully transition into the main animation. Here's one I did recently: http://www.prepcosmetics.com/ Plus, if someone's on a high speed connection, they may not see the preloader at all (especially with a good transition), so it's win win
The animated white background lines are really nice. Are those lines are movie clips or frame by frame animation? They are very smooth in action. Perfect short animated introduction. @mexicolarry Why you want to use a have flash file in header. Make a separate link on homepage to load flash movie in seperate window. Use a small animated description on header part. If still you want to have a big file in header use animated preloaders which keeps your visitor engage till the time main movie loads.
The lines are movie clips, but in a way also frame by frame. In order to play smoothly on all computers, it's always a good idea to convert your tweens into keyframes so you don't force the computer to calculate the tweens.
Thanks Sketch! I'll have our graphic design guy look at your example and see if he can get any ideas! I really appreciate your insight! --Larry