Flash animation too big!

[Xannax]

Hello, I'm new on these boards(but I've been animating on flash (not for web) since years).
I'm not sure this fits here, but I didn't know where to post it exactly. Here's my problem: I've been doing a flash animation, as an opening for a website. It is important for my client that the whole animation would be as small as possible, because his target doesn't like to wait and isn't likely to have a quick connection.
So it was a challenge for me to create as few symbols as possible, and re-use them in many ways, so the end-user doesn't notice there's actually so few symbols drawn. I achieved to create a complex 30 secs animation with as little symbols as possible.
Now. Here's the thing that makes me want to crush my head on a wall: When I drop all my symbols on the scene, the swf file is as big as 13 kb, which is very fine. BUT, when I export the whole movie, which include scales (zooms) and motion tweens (pans), I end up with a file as big as 1MB!! 1 Meg is still fine, but I'm not nearly over, and I haven't added the sounds. My question is: Does Flash export motion tweens (scale and position) as different symbols? If not, where's the problem? If I was to redo all the tweens and all my zooms with actionscript, would it be any different?
Thanks in advance

[manny2k]

Hi Xannax

Have you looked at the publishing settings? I have mine set to compress movie, for example I have a 1mb .fla that when its published goes down to a142kb swf

Hope that is of some help

manny2k

[Egg Bramhill]

Xannax,

Are you creating the shape, then Converting to Symbol before you reuse it?

[manny2k]

Egg

Will that make a difference to the file size?


Manny2k

[Egg Bramhill]

Manny,

I think it does. If you create or convert to symbol, Flash can continue to use the symbol repeatedly with a far smaller overhead than had you just copy/pasted multiple copies on stage.

The other reason for using symbols is that you only need to change the base symbol for it to effect all duplicates of that symbol globaly.

[manny2k]

Thanks Egg , i'll keep an eye on that in the future.

Regards


Manny2k

[RedWombat]

Are you using any raster or bitmap images in your file that are being exported to your SWF?

If you don't optimize those graphics before you bring them into Flash, they can really bloat an SWF.

Also, I agree with Egg, use symbols whenever you can.