Urgent Flash Advice

[geoffb]

Hi,

My boss is focused on creating a full browser flash brochure website that can scale to any size screen. My problem is for the project we need to use 3 full size rotating fading images over the whole background in each of the 5 pages. Thats 15 images over 400mb each!

Each image is coming out at over 400mb and even with just 2 pages done and no animation yet except for the image fade in out I am already up to a flash file size of 3277kb and taking around 20-25 seconds to load.

Does anyone have any suggestions otherwise users are not going to want to view the site.

Can you set up a preloader that loads the first section and then displays while others are loading ect?

What are my options please.

cheers
geoffb

[rocknbil]

Does anyone have any suggestions otherwise users are not going to want to view the site.

While it's not helpful, and I'm sure you've already tried to get this point across, your boss's idea will fail, and miserably. He is pursuing directives that are what he wants, not what his visitors want. This s a blatant abuse of Flash on two points: using Flash for the sake of cool, and loading it up so heavily that most users will close the window after four seconds or so, and buy from someone else.

Can you set up a preloader that loads the first section and then displays while others are loading ect?

Sure you can, you use an XML file that imports the locations of the external files, then on load of the first image continue loading subsequent objects/images into empty movie clips. But it's a waste of energy, it will likely never fly (well.)

You mean 4mb, not 400. :-)

[geoffb]

Hi rocknbil,

Nice to hear from you.

And yes you are right. We are having a meeting in the morning about the best approach to this.

Our Creative Director has viewed other full browser flash sites and wants this one like those.

Im up against some pretty labour intensive/code intensive flash sites and have 2 days to complete my project.

I have not done the XML import route and would be interested if you know any handy tuts on this one.

cheers
geoffb

[rocknbil]

One from a flash slide show [webmasterworld.com]

It doesn't store them in movie clips, but that's how you import. With "reasonable" file sizes, the caching was never necessary, by the time image 1 is done displaying subsequent images are already pulled in.