Flash Optimizer 2: The only SWF compressor
FlashLite movies have to be small, and fast . I have noticed that after running the compressed SWF onmy Nokia N81 8GB phone they played much faster. To do this, you have to reduce the image sizes and other objects to run fast. Flash Optimizer does the trick. If you work with a banner and your SWF's a bit larger than the space you have, you can compress it easily to the correct size without much loss of quality. If most of your work is banner creation, then you need Flash Optimizer. Other facts The program is available for both Mac and Windows and I have to say that the look and feel is correct for both platforms. On Windows it is like the newOffice and you can find everything easily. On a Mac, it looks like a classic Cocoa App. It is pretty, easy to use and user-friendly. Although you can compress all pictures before importing them into the Flash movie's library, using this program is definitely the easiest way . Just with one click you can convert all of them to JPEG format and lower the quality. A few words about the disadvantages:
unfortunately the program supports Flash Filters (glow, etc..) in ‘Low’ preset only, but if you only compress for example the sounds in your swf, it’ll leave the Filters as normal. But, if you compress it without filters, the movie will run faster (but if you created it with filters, you will probably need them). It also doesn’t support Flash Player 10 swf-s yet, but Eltima Software assured me that by the time you’ll get this article, you can compress your Flash Player 10 movies also. Sometimes I have found the scrolling and playback a little buggy and once I had to view it in a standalone Flash Player. All of these problems I am sure will be corrected in the future. When you compare the old and the new movie, it does not synchronizes the mouse events on the two movies. For example, if you have a tic-tac-toe game, you have to click twice as much to see the result on both the new and the old one. I miss this feature. Using Flash Optimizer First I tried the Software on my most recent full-flash site is which is quite large, because I
I think the shapes were over compressed, so decreased it to 2%. I also checked to delete the pictures meta data. So the compression was started and it took 12 seconds. The view was sometimes buggy, I was not able to scroll and some mouse events did not work or only worked in the standalone Flash Player. The result: the compressed SWF file size decreased to 44% from the original size , the space was mostly gained on images. The shape's sizes were cut in half and the font lost 99% of its weight. I also lost some space in the 'Other' category. As I said, I embedded 100% quality JPEG format thumbnails in the file, so if I embed 90% quality files, this program would only mean 20% compression. So, if you are lazy like me, you need it. I also tested it on a photographer's full- flash site, which was under development. When I tried it with the preset named 'best', it converted it to 1.2 Mb from the original 1.7 Mb. Impressive. But, the images had very large pixels, like it had been censored. The logo was in vectorial format and looked messed up. So, I started again from the 'basic' settings. This time it had gained only 2%, but it looked as good as the original one. Then I tried setting image conversion to 15%. It looked the same. So, I used to use very good shapes and images in the Library. I noticed on the graph that the sounds were a big part of the file, because the client wanted a full song to be played on the site. I optimized the streaming and converted it to mono. In the end, I gained about 10% on the whole file. Best today Flash Optimizer is the only program that supports Flash Player 9, Zlib compression and all the Action Script formats. It does not need the FLA file and it saves the optimized file next to the original one; with a '_opt' ending (as default). The compression is fast, usually it takes about 15 seconds, which is very nice. You can preview the compression next to the original or in full screen. It shows you percents and amounts of where and how much space was saved. You can set everything, so the result will be exactly as you want it. In the end you will usually decrease the original SWF by 15% and you can compress images after exporting the SWF. Basically, you will gain most of the space with the images and the shapes. Unfortunately, there are still some bugs and I miss some functions, but it is a great application to have in our Creative Suite. It retails for about $99, but before buying, check out it for yourself, download the trial from http: //www.flashoptimizer.com
have kept the gallery's thumbnail images in the SWF. It took some time to download them. So I started the program, then I opened the SWF, and started to edit the compression settings. I set the images compression to 10%, because I did not want them to have big pixels. The video and the sounds was set to 30%, because there is hardly any video and sounds in it. I set the shape compression to 5%, because I did not want to loose the current look. I set all of them manually. The fonts were set to 31%, because there were only small texts. Here are the results:
Figure 3. Preview optimization result
GÁBOR CSOMÁK Student at Budapest University of Technology and Economics, and Flash Freelancer.
Figure 4 . Fullscreen
03/2008 (5)
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