Video Highlight Marlow Markus' Macromedia Flash tips

You've seen Flash animations everywhere on the Web, and you like them.

You like how the animations are entertaining, engaging, and flashy (excuse the pun). At the same time, they can also be bandwidth hogs.

Sometimes Flash animations do not run fluidly and end up being more annoying than fun. While broadband connections are quickly being adopted in the home, the vast majority of people do not have high-speed Internet connections.

So if you want to add Flash to your own site, it's up to you as a Flash developer to optimize your animation. These five tips can help you improve the performance of your Flash animations. Use them, and your users will be one step closer to loving your creations as much as you do.

• Construct your animation as simply as possible. Create characters that are made of objects that can be used more than once.
• Stay away from fancy features such as tweening, or transparency, as much as possible. If you do use them, understand that the feature will affect the performance of your animation.
• The more bitmaps you use, the slower the playback.
• Take advantage of keyframes and the effects menu as much as possible. Draw something once and then tell Flash when you want to use that image again instead of duplicating it.
• Very important: Set all of your symbols' behaviors to "graphic." Once you have everything perfect, set each layer in the final scene to "movieclip," then output it. This can reduce the file size by as much as 75 percent.