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USING FLASH CS4 PROFESSIONAL
Best practices
Optimize colors
•
Use the Color menu in the Symbol Property inspector to create many instances of a single symbol in different
colors.
•
Use the Color panel (Window
> Color) to match the color palette of the document to a browser-specific palette.
•
Use gradients sparingly. Filling an area with gradient color requires about 50 bytes more than filling it with solid
color.
•
Use alpha transparency sparingly because it can slow playback.
Speed up document display
To speed up the document display, use commands in the View menu to turn off rendering-quality features that require
extra computing and slow down document display.
None of these commands have any effect on how Flash exports a document. To specify the display quality of Flash
documents in a web browser, use the
object
and
embed
parameters. The Publish command can do this for you
automatically.
❖
Select View
> Preview Mode, and select from the following options:
Outlines
Displays only the outlines of the shapes in your scene and causes all lines to appear as thin lines. This makes
it easier to reshape your graphic elements and to display complex scenes quickly.
Fast
Turns off anti-aliasing and displays all the colors and line styles of your drawing.
Antialias
Turns on anti-aliasing for lines, shapes, and bitmaps and displays shapes and lines so that their edges appear
smoother on the screen. Draws more slowly than the Fast option. Anti-aliasing works best on video cards that provide
thousands (16-bit) or millions (24-bit) of colors. In 16- or 256-color mode, black lines are smoothed, but colors might
look better in Fast mode.
Antialias Text
Smooths the edges of any text. Works best with large font sizes and can be slow with large amounts of
text. This is the most common mode in which to work.
Full
Renders all content on the Stage fully. Might slow down display.
See also
“
Publishing overview
” on page 379
Optimizing graphics and animation
Before you create optimized and streamlined animations or graphics, outline and plan your project. Make a target for
the file size and length of the animation, and test throughout the development process.
Follow these guidelines to optimize graphics and animation:
•
Avoid using gradients, because they require many colors and calculations to be processed, which is more difficult
for a computer processor to render.
•
For the same reason, keep the amount of alpha or transparency you use in a SWF file to a minimum.
Animating objects that include transparency is processor-intensive and should be kept to a minimum. Animating
transparent graphics over bitmaps is a particularly processor-intensive kind of animation, and must be kept to a
minimum or avoided completely.
Updated 5 March 2009
