Foundation Flash CS4 for Designers- P5: I can remember the day as clear as if it were just yesterday. I was walking by my boss’s office late one winter afternoon at the college where I teach, and he called me into his office. Sitting on his desk was a thin, white box with some sort of weird swirl on it. He slid the box across to me and asked, “You know anything about Flash?” | CHAPTER 2 Figure 2-61. At 10 quality the image is terrible. Figure 2-62. At 80 quality the image is much better. 8. Knowing that the quality between 50 and 80 is a vast improvement let s see if we can maintain quality but reduce the file size. Set the Quality value to 65 and click the Test button. The difference between 65 and 80 is minimal but the file size has reduced to 3KB. Click OK to apply this setting and close the dialog box. 9. Save the movie and press Ctrl Enter Cmd Return to test the movie. This will create the SWF you need. 10. Minimize Flash and the SWF window and navigate to your Exercise folder. The results are to say the least dramatic. The file size has reduced to 6KB from 44KB as shown in Figure 2-63. I Figure 2-63. Applying com- 73- - n cl rK I i i ij I i piessoi luiria Htwi iiesuiu X SWF Movie x SWF Movie 44kb 6kb in seriously smaller and more efficient SWF files. 11. Save and close the open movie. 100 CREATING ARTWORK IN FLASH Using GIF files in Flash There was a point a few years back where many web and Flash designers were preparing to celebrate the death of the GIF image and the GIF animation. The reason was simple in a universe where bandwidth is plentiful and every computer on the planet is able to display 16-bit color the limited color range and small file size of a GIF image become irrelevant. GIF images were developed for a time of limited color depth monitors that could display only 256 colors and dial-up modems. Then a funny thing happened on the way to the wake the GIFs arose from their deathbed. The reason was banner advertising. Ad agencies and their clients were discovering the Web really was a viable advertising medium and that Flash was a great interactive tool for ads. The problem was that standards for banner advertising appeared on the scene and the agencies discovered they were handed a file size limit of 30KB. This tended to go against the grain and as they grappled with the .
