File Size and Drawings

When you are new to this type of drawing you will probably do a lot of stumbling, fixing, tweaking, nudging, connecting, fudging, and scribbling. That's fine - in bitmap images that type of editing doesn't have any bearing on the final file size. Not so in Flash. Every extra line, nudge, and tweak you make in a vector image is another equation for the computer to run to figure out which colors go where. Remember parabolas? How would you like to do another parabola story problem for every pen stroke? Well, the computer doesn't like it, either.

Luckily Flash can help you round out your chunkified doodles. Draw something in your scratch movie with the pencil tool that has a lot of curves and turns. Select what you just drew with the arrow tool and optimize the curves (CTRL - ALT - SHIFT - C, or Modify > Curves > Optimize). This will really help cut down the file size if you have a lot of messy hand-drawn images.

When you use text in your movie you are forced to make a decision between better file size or better looking text. If you choose to enable "Antialias Text" (CTRL - ALT - SHIFT - T, or View > Antialias Text), the file size will increase noticeably. This will be a familiar concern to those who have tried to make interesting ad banner gif's with text.

Now that we're getting familiar with creating in Flash it's time to add those little extras to make our movie more advanced. Next week we'll learn how to add interactivity with actions and gain control with variables.

Gradients
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