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Photos
Because Flash files usually consist of vector shapes, and the transforms are relatively simple, the files can
be very small. Photos and bitmaps can be embedded into Flash animations, but unless you are careful it
will result in huge animation files. You can perform all core Flash transforms on bitmaps or photos (i.e.
you can move, scale, squash, rotate, fade and re-color.).
Flash files can include both PNG and JPEG images just as .xar files do, and Web Designer Premium
automatically creates photos of the right resolution when creating the Flash file. So for example you can
load a hi-res digital camera image, size this down to be say 200 pixels, and this means that a 200 pixel
image will get included, and not the full hi-res JPEG.
When higher resolution photos are converted down for inclusion in Flash files the JPEG compression
setting (Animation Properties dialog, Flash Options tab) can be used to control how compressed your
JPEG images are. See below.
When tweening bitmaps or photos, only one copy of the bitmap is stored in the Flash file, so you can
perform transformations of the bitmap with little overhead. In other words, just because the bitmap
appears on frames 1, 2 and 3 of your animation, this does not mean three copies of the bitmap are
embedded in the Flash file.
Non-JPEG Bitmaps
Other types of bitmaps, for example, BMP, TIFF, or PNG bitmaps, are usually a lot larger and thus less
suitable for use in Flash animations (for photos JPEG compression is a lot better than PNG). However if
you include a low resolution PNG image (that is one of 96dpi or less ? the status line shows you the
resolution of any selected image) then this is kept as a PNG image in the Flash file. Higher resolution
images (>96dpi) will be converted into a JPEG (transparent JPEG if required) .
You can control the compression used for this automatic JPEG conversion using a slider in the Flash
Options tab of the Animation Properties
dialog. The usual compression value is 75%, but you can vary the quality, preview the animation and
quickly see the quality and size savings.
256 color or less bitmaps (such as GIF) are not encoded as JPEG and will be embedded using PNG
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