Especially in early years, Flash had some bit bad name in web world. Instead of waiting a long download time for Flash movie to play, people would click the ’skip intro’ button. That’s a nightmare of Flash design, because of the big size of movie. Though it’s not so easy to decrease bytes of a SWF file while keeps the quality, what ever in another side, we could always find some Flash in good design playing smoothly and even experience like watching a scene of film. SWF file while it download, will display each frame until downloaded all assets of that frame, so it’s very essential to know how to organize assets to be downloaded in each frame. Many Flash designers like to ignore this and put every thing to download in the first stage, to display a first page and their main scenes wouldn’t start until everything is ready.

Adobe has a good example of this, a neat advertisement movie for their own CS 2. In the first one or two seconds, it display a line of text with a button to begin. This give them some seconds to download their underneath assets. The whole SWF file actually has about 4M bytes, that wouldn’t be easy to display if they didn’t organized well with the bandwidth profiler.

After the button is clicked, a transition of bluring the background, scene changes into table and papers. It also give some seconds for underneath downloading surely, as well as position animation time it needed. From this case we could have some good methods to make a good Flash movie even in big size, using some effects/animations to capture some time to download assets to display smoothly.

Unlike film compositing and post-production, Flash design like this (herein I called ‘Neat film’) need to have to balance of speed, bandwidth, the size of assets to play. It’s much limited but it could.

This method could be work only for design-based Flash movie, for Flash developers it wouldn’t be useful as Flash codes are mostly not working on frames. I would try to figure out some other methods later.

Conclusion

To play a big size SWF quickly and smoothly (based on frame structure):

• Display small size assets first.
• Use some transition/animation methods to steal some seconds for underneath downloading of big size assets.
• Keep a continuous balance on design, motion speed, bandwidth, organization of assets.