For those looking to optimize file-size inside (and outside) of your Flash movie, I have done a fairly in-depth amount of research into which formats Flash handles best once loaded into the main time-line. While I know that many no longer do this, it is ideal for those of us who still do animated presentations on the time-line. I was always under the impression that PNG-24 was the smallest file-size on publish, but I was wrong.

After extensive testing, a flattened LZW TIF with default Photoshop settings seemed to compress the best for images without transparency & take up the least amount of file-size on disk. But, for those transparent image needs PNG-24 (using the Save for Web dialog) won out.

I also noticed, just switching the AS library from 2 – 3 barely increased file-size on publish as well. The same was true with activating JPG de-blocking.

Obviously, if you are remotely loading your images, the smallest file-size image wins that test.

Get the PDF of the breakdown here.

I recently ran into a perplexing issue. I had used my standard pre-loading code in AS3 (using .bytesTotal) in a media loading project. This had never been an issue before, but at work we recently moved to a new server solution. All of the sudden, IE (of course) stopped loading a value into the .bytesTotal. My loader was returning NaN. It still completed its ‘loaded’ actions, but wouldn’t track the active loading. Then I tested it in Chrome & Safari, and it was happening there too! Firefox was fine however. Now I was really confused. So I did a bit of research…

Apparently, I’m not alone. The issue seeming stems from files being served up with GZIP compression before being sent to the Flash Player. We had the server solution turn off GZIP compression & Voila! It worked.

Hope this helps someone, like it did me!