animating movie clip

[mushy]

This is my first post, so forgive me if I am in the wrong forum.

I have created an all Flash site that will have an html side for those w/o Flash. The problem is it takes FOREVER too load. I already know I need to put the images in an array to get the file size down. And I can do that. My problem come in with the animation. In the current site, many of the images are tweened to rotate and I don't know how to duplicate that effect through actionscripting now that I want to use the array. The file size is .swf is 2.6 MB (yes, I know this is tremendous and I hope you will recover from your jaw hitting the floor) so you have been forewarned.

The site is
http://www.essenceofbeautyphotography.com

Thanks for any help!

[Kirk]

welcome to here! (in fact i'm just a newby came a day before:) )

I've visited your site. Well, frankly speaking, it takes ages to load the movie...:(

My first advice to you is to add a preloader for the movie to let visitors know that the site is REALLY loading. Some may go only because they see nothing for 10~15 seconds!

Plus, load the pictures only when visitors click on the buttons. Only when visitor clicks on , say, the"portraits" button, the navigation for portraits pics start loading. After the navigation squares are loaded & the visitor clicks on a picture, the actual picture(big one) starts loading. That should be the case, not loading everything at the start! You can also add preloaders for the pictures.

If you know nothing about preloaders & loadMovie, you can go through this forum to find some posts about them or just go thru the tutorials.

One last thing: Remember to show visitors something even when your stuff is not ready!

[mushy]

Ages to load really is the best description. I am going to add a preloader ... always intended to, but at this file size it will have to be the mother of all preloaders. As built every image is in one movie clip in the first and only frame for the site. That's obviously not the way to go. Where I'm leaning now is to put the imags in different folders for separate arrays that will be activated by mouse events. I just don't want to lose the whole rotating picture thing if at all possible. It may not be.

[Sualdam]

The way I estimate it, you have seventy photos on your site and you loaded all of them in one go :( That's a definite no-no whether you use Flash or any other method for designing sites.

Even with a preloader, people won't wait that long - I have a fast connection and it still took between 30 and 60 seconds to load, which is bad for me. On a 56k dialup it will take at least 10 minutes for someone to see anything :eek:

You really ought to be aiming for no more than about 100-200kb initial load and then - like Kirk said - load images when you need them.

Also, what is the typical size of your images? The thumbs ought to be no more than 1 or 2kb each for that size and the main JPG images around 30-50kb each at the most.

I would guess you are OK with those, since your total SWF size would correspond to around 70 photos at 40kb each, so the issue seems to be loading them all in at once.

I also noticed that you are using a lot of different effects on your images - I'd stick to one per section if I were you. It'll look neater.

There's some nice photos - it would be best to focus users' attention on those rather than the Flash transitions.

[mushy]

Thanks for your responses ... you both seem to be saying what I have already determined needs to be corrected. Using the array with only half the site fixed, I'm already down to 48K ... a major improvement. It looks like I'm going to have to lose the fancy transforms and settle for simple fadeIns and fadeOuts. Maybe I can use the fancy footwork in a preloader. ;)