Backgrounds

[2Dan]

Woah, thank you very much for that in depth explanation Milchreis! It helped a lot. And thank you Flashqueen for your advise as well.

Wait wait wait wait wait, that can't be right at all. there is no way Flash is limited to 60 second animations... thats seems so limited!

[FlashQueen]

2Dan,

I didn't mean to imply that Flash can't handle animations greater than 1 minute in length. It can, but for the total management of a "long" animation, best practices are to break it up into shorter FLA/SWFs.

[milchreis]

2Dan,

I didn't mean to imply that Flash can't handle animations greater than 1 minute in length. It can, but for the total management of a "long" animation, best practices are to break it up into shorter FLA/SWFs.

yes.breaking things apart is a key feature of flash. That's the thing when you "buffer" a video. You can watch the video without having the whole video loaded. (but you need some buffer, in case you're not downloading fast enough)

Same is true for animations, as they are basically videos.
Most people create preloaders that load completely, then you can start using the flash, but this obviously kills the feature of flash to buffer its content.
In fact, if you're doing a game, this is a good idea, because you some sort of don't know when to use what (or at least it's more complicated to tell) . But for an animation, you most of the times start at the beginning and watch it (if its good) until the end.

Only load what you need (and that's what the user wants).

[2Dan]

Ah i see, so I'd have to split up a project that was longer then one minute. Would i just import the completed SWF's into one new document? is there a certain actionscript ill need to enable buffering?

[keyframer]

Just thought I'd chime in here because I saw mention of the Deco tool earlier...
Flash CS5 will have many additional Deco tool brushes - and they are really pretty cool! I am not allowed to go into detail but you will be able to "paint" buildings, fire, smoke, lightning and even particle effects - many of these brushes can be animated with the stroke of your stylus too! Stay tuned for some articles on my blog (keyframer.com) when I am allowed to spill the beans

[Ranoka]

Oooh, Chris has started dropping hints. Really can't wait to get my hands on CS5
Hopefully it's going to be more stable than CS4...

And more on topic:
I would recommend for backgrounds in Flash that you consider using Vector and caching as bitmap, you can save space and optimise cpu cycles that way, getting the benefit of both vector and bitmap. If you need to zoom/rotate the background you can use bitmap caching for that too in CS4/FlashPlayer10, if you set the z co-ordinate to 0 to turn the 3D mode on, then it will use the 3D renderer to make things faster because it won't need to keep re-caching when you rotate or zoom.

Personally I've started using Illustrator for drawing (mostly because everyone else at work does it that way), I find the drawing tools in Flash have become some what un-responsive and less flexible compared to Illustrator. Maybe they've improved things in CS5?