Hi,
I made a flash animation (>correction, still making!), but created it rather for putting on a dvd etc for playing via that medium. That meant i blissfully crafted away with my idea with little too no regard for filesize.
However just recently i have decided to venture into creating a website to display my ideas, projects, general rants, and of course my animations. So i was wandering, before i go and recreate said megabyte-devouring animation into a more web friendly form, what is the average file size of a flash animation on t'internet? Just so i know if i've got alotta 'compressing' to do on this animation, or maybe (just maybe) I can go straight ahead with the upload anyway!
I'm more concerned with potential viewers of the animation having insane load times if my animations are too big.
Are we talking like 100kb's or less on average, or in the mb's or some other byte figure? Baring in mind my animation is around 2 minutes long.
Thanks, Rich.
________________________________Perpetual Motion________________________________
flash can tell you roughly how long it'll take to download:
when you publish your flash movie you can look at view>bandwith profiler and simulate download...here you can change the hypothetical bandwidth settings to see how long it will take for diff. connection speeds....QED
I used to worry about flash movie sizes but now since I guess the majority of people have broadband so I say sling it up full size
A question: when you say your work-in-progress is 2 megabytes or more, are you talking about the published .swf or the .fla authoring file? (since the .swf will be much smaller than the .fla file--just wanted to make sure you were considering that difference.)
You can add preloaders to bigger Flash movies (well, you should always have a preloader on a web-based Flash movie). This gives you the option of loading __% of the movie before starting it. (sometimes you might want to preload the whole thing; in some cases it makes sense to start the movie after 50% or so is loaded; the rest loads while you watch--this takes some testing to see what works best with the kind of file you have).
I would also recommend that with any sizable download, you include the filesize next to the link and, if possible, have a thumbnail so a viewer can have an idea of what they are waiting to see.
Ted Nunes - www.tedtoons.com
By assuming everyone in your potential market has broadband you discount a sizeable portion of the world computer user market. And it leads to sloppy web optimization which leads to a poor experience by your end user.
http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/0601/
I can always tell a site designed by someone with your attitude: sling it up full size! And for artists and designers to fall into that sort of trap doesn't say much for their skills.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
yeah you could be right - but look at utube, vodpod, google video ...the movie file sizes there would've been considered prohibitively massive a few years ago....or look at the number one podcast Gervais did- talking at least 14 megs per episode...!!
Plus, in the UK, at least, it's cheaper now to use broadband then dial-up...
anyway, no worries..just my POV
Thanks for the replies/help everyone...
Especially that chart, that's just what i needed. I was very glad to hear that an estimated download time on broadband for a 5mb is around a minute, that's great! In consideration of dial-up (which on your chart is 37 min d-load time for an equivalent file), do you reckon i should have another option on the page of the site displaying the movie to download it in 2 seperate parts, perhaps saying '...Animation: Part1' etc, so they could cut the d-load time in half, watch the first part whilst the second is downloading, or something? So essentially when you link to the page, there is three downloads, one (the complete version) for bband, and another for dialup (in two parts)?
This is probably the hard away around this, as its just off the top of my head. Any other ideas, for instance, is multiple choice downloads of the file the way to go? Cus like phacker mentioned, it's not great sense to cut off a big portion of potential audience members if you can avoid it. So it would be nice to have a more 'accessable' option for dial-up users, as well as the norm option for broadband amigos!
I defo will include a preloader, as i know how useful they are when it comes to waiting. Atm i'm a staright up animator, with little knowledge of the actionscript side of flash, so will delve into that when the animation is raring to go with the uploading flow! I'm sure there are many-a tuts out there so i won't pester you for how to do that (....yet ;) !!
Also, thanks hypnotic_frog for that link to the video converter, i will try it out with the flash equavilent and see which gives the best results (as it'll kinda be a showreel on dvd, so max quality there is important).
PS: Tedtoons: It is at it's prepublished size atm, but not quite finished. But it won't be massivley compressed as to overide an annoying audio 'lets-go-randomly-outta-sync' problem on lengthier animation in flash (apparently it's a nice lil quirk on flash 8....great :rolleyes: ), i had to 'overide audio settings' (apparently a 'sound-kicker' does it too, but like i said, i know little about using action script atm).
________________________________Perpetual Motion________________________________
I wouldn't break it up for dialup users. Just make sure to label the size and maybe post a few thumbs and a brief description. If they are serious about viewing it, they'll click the button and go do something else while it downloads. That's what I do anyway...still on dialup, most of the time.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
Remember not all broadband is created equal. This is a calculator you can use on the net to figure download speeds.
http://www.martindalecenter.com/AATimeCalc.html
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
Yahoo uses thumbnail size screen and that works for me.
How large is your file? It depends on a lot of factors. If you're just presenting a stickman battle or mindless fart joke I am not prepared to wait through much more than 600K. If it's a good story with sound and the thumbnail shows promise, I'd wait through 5 megs without thinking. But you get much larger than that and I'd have to have seen some of your previous work or had it recommended to me by someone before I tied my computer up that long. I wait for the goober.nu stuff to download, because I know it's quality.
And if you present it in Flash, please build a preloader, and embed it in an html so that the preloader works.
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.
I thing you should turn your animation in a video file; and after that embed it on your webpage.
Just my opinium.
I agree with your comments phacker, you do have to give reason for the audience to want to watch them. But that's for me to worry about (he says with a confident wink! :D )
The ultimate idea is to showecase what i have done and what i am doing etc, so the animation in mention has a full audio track (speech, sfx, music), and multi-layered backgrounds. Essentially, it is NOT a traditional flash animation (in the sense of a web-animation), more a short cartoon that happens to be made with Flash (wanna animate to the fullest potential of my ideas - but working on getting the funds to do so, so flash is the best option at present!)
It atm is just over 2mb's, but that is a lil way off of 'el finito', so i'm guessing it (working like i am aat current), is going to be around 3/3.5 mb's when complete.
How long is a load time roughly for an animation this length?
Just so i know if i'm gonna have to compress a little, alot, or not at all, to get it on the web (in a manner appropriate for viewing).
And i defo agree with the preloader comment, as it gives you something to hope for!
________________________________Perpetual Motion________________________________
By the way RTP if u want watching ur flash on DVD u need convert it to someone video format. For example avi or mpeg.
I heard that last version of flash convert to video. But quality is awful :((
Personally I use flash to video converter. Check this out if you need it. :) Cheers!
Keep clear!
You might find this chart helpful:
File size: 56.6 modem: T1 :
500KB: 4 minutes <1 minute
1MB: 7 minutes <1 minute
5MB: 37 minutes <1 minute
20MB: 150 minutes 2 minutes
50MB: 370 minutes 4 minutes
100MB 740 minutes 9 minutes
Pat Hacker, Visit Scooter's World.