Re: FLASH: Site check: performance?

[Gahlord Dewald]

re: http://www.boyettconstruction.com


> ...each "zoom" is a 5-frame alpha fade, and it seems like Flash is heaving out 

> each frame (instead of dropping frames to keep up with the frame rate).

Alpha fades are way processor intensive. Especially with a billion lines on

screen. Running two of them at once (the view fading in and the view fading out)

is certain to bog down. Flash doesn't drop frames to maintain a frame rate

(which seems strange to me-JD you reading this? Why is it that Flash doesn't

drop frames? Maybe it's to keep actionscript keyframes running or something...).

Somewhere there was a thread about streaming silence to force frame dropping.

You might want to investigate that. Or, more likely, adjust your creative to

take these matters into account (faster fades, make artwork that just contains

the visible sections of the building, etc.).


> I'd like to hear some opinions, especially from Mac users:  does the 

> zooming look acceptable, or clunky?

Mac G3 250mhz, Powerbook, DSL, IE 5:


Clunky as hell. The building is very beautiful. But the entire intro took 1'30"

to play on my machine (not including download time--1.5 minutes of actual

animation); compare this number to what it should be by counting your frames and

dividing by framerate to get a sense of performance on my end. 


Note that this is long enough to qualify as a short film entry at some film

festivals. Rule of thumb I try to follow when developing skipintros is to keep

the whole thing less than 30 seconds (the standard length of a TV commercial,

which is essentially what a skipintro is). 


See if you can "build" the building faster because that seemed to be animating

at the specified speeed (i.e. it didn't look clunky) it's just plain animated

slowly. The building is, as I said, very beautiful: just give it to us faster.


The alpha sweeps play like mud. I'd be reaching for the skipintro faster than

you can say "Jakob Nielsen is a ninny." In general full screen alpha sweeps with

lots of lines will bring the movie to a halt. Perhaps try color tweens to and

from white (your background color) on seperate layers etc you might be able to

pull it off that way. But all that full screen tweening is going to do you in,

performance-wise.


Hope that's helpful.


g


Gahlord Dewald

Weeds Media Consortium

Hoops of Fire. Dancing Bears.

Interactive Designers.

http://www.weedsmedia.com


v: 802.658.4267 x 1

f: 800.863.9606

e:

gahlordweedsmedia [dot] com

Weeds Media Consortium

416 Pine Street

Burlington, VT 05401

USA




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