I’ve recently bought a digital camera. I’ve also got a storyline that I’ve been developing with my friend for two years now, and some Barbie, Kelly, Ken, Tommy, Crissy, and other dolls that we’re planning to animate. We’re ready to take it to the…er… computer screen.
Problem:
I have Flash MX, which I’ve played with and made animations (though drawn in Flash) with before. I made a small stop-motion animation with a wooden doll (taking pics and importing each pic to a 550 x 400 sized stage), and found that the file size for a 35-frame animation in .swf format was 4.43 megabytes large.
I could reduce the size of the stage and the pictures I’m importing, but what else can I do to reduce the file size?
Well, get something like Premiere or some other VIDEO editing tools and export to an MPEG4 format. That should give you about 5MB per minute at DVD quality, and you can reduce quality to reduce filesize.
Yeah basically all you have to do is compress the video, but only once you’re completely done. You should try and use lossless formats when you are working on your project.
Flash simply stores all those pictures in your .swf as individual JPEG images. It’s fine to use Flash to work on your project, if you have the disk space, but instead of exporting to SWF, use a real video compression format when you’re finished. MPEG and other video compression techniques can save tons of space by comparing each frame to the previous frames and not storing the parts of the image that haven’t changed (or have only moved around).
I have Flash 4 for Windows, and it can export to AVI or QuickTime. Unless Flash MX supports more formats, your best bet is probably to export to AVI. If you have a codec like DivX or XviD installed, you can compress while you export; otherwise, you can save an uncompressed AVI (which will be huge) and use another program like AutoGK to compress it.