Tools for optimizing / minimizing swf filesize

Question

Hi guys,

I'm working on a big flash site with lots of component swfs and a ton of heavy multimedia (video, audio, image) content. File sizes are quickly getting ridiculous and I'm looking around for solutions--I want to minimize user wait time as much as possible (and my art direction is such that minimizing multimedia isn't an option). Obviously, there are steps that can be taken to minimize assets before bringing them into Flash (video compression, etc), but are there any third-party tools that you'd recommend using to analyize and further optimize compiled swfs?

A quick google search yields a ton of hits, most of which seem to be of dubious pedigree; what sorts of approaches have you found useful in the past?

Thanks,

Justin

Answer 1

If it is "a big flash site", you should never have a single swf to hold all the things.

Usually each page is created as a swf and have a main holder to load them dynamically on request.

Also, loads the media elements instead of embedding them. It will let you manage the site easier too.

Update:

Sorry that I haven't noticed you've already done these... I think the remainning option is really trying those swf optimizer.

I've thought of using Gzip on server side, but seems that there is problem.

BTW, I found this one.

Answer 2

The simplest first pass tool to use is the built in 'Generate size report' function in Flash.

In CS4, go to your publish settings-->Flash tab and check the 'Generate size report' box, then publish.

Flash will now create a text file with a listing of all assets and their byte sizes.

You can use this report to identify your high profile targets and do basic optimizations (jpeg compress bitmaps as much as you can without losing visual quality, embed only subsets of fonts according to usage, compress audio as much as is possible without distortion, that sort of thing)