I am trying to encorporate a flash animation in the center of my website.
The center is approx. 778 px wide.
I want to make the animation approx. 778 wide by 300 high. With the background
as an image
and text boxes that point out certain facts about the product that will
animate on top of the static image.
http://www.homedics.com/
Something like the center of this website but not that elaborate.
How can I reduce the file size of the background graphic so that it will load
quickly?
I can copy into flash and use the library properties quality but I can't get
the file small enough without loss of
quality. Is there a secret that anyone can share with me as how to make this
background graphic or some kind of template
or tutorial I can use to see how this works?
Please help.

Unfortunately you can't have the cake and eat it. You're asking for magic here.

PNG-24 looks marvellous but the file size is massive...
GIF has its obvious limits...
JPG artifacts are ugly as sin, and you will get them if you're not willing to
put up with a big file...

Your best bet is to use jpg and try optimizing the picture in Photoshop's
"save for web...". It's WYSIWYG. Don't let Flash downsample it because it does
a worse job of it than Photoshop. Once imported into Flash, open the picture's
properties and disallow Flash to recompress the picture.

Thank you for your reply,
Here is another website that my boss has pointed out to
me...http://www.bosufitness.com/home.php
Can you tell me if there is any other way that something like this can be done?
And what size is an appropriate size for a flash file like this?
If I can't use the whole image 778 maybe I can come up with splitting the
image and the flash file with the
call out features.
Please help

Yeah I usually do the same thing (i.e. import as PNG), but we did a comparison
once of Adobe and Flash both reducing the jpg quality to 50% and the Adobe
picture was much better. So if you're really intent on keeping the file size to
a minimum without atrocious results, the extra Photoshop step is worth it. If
we're only talking one picture, it's not that much of an ordeal.

Broadband is so predominant these days that people have just stopped caring...
just about any regular HTML site forces you to download half a megabyte right
at the front page.

As long as you're not forcing a 10 MB Flash intro down the visitor's throat,
you'll be OK. Unless your target group is dial-up users. ;-)

[quoted text, click to view]

Plus, beside the control you still have transparency which is way cool...
Been using PNG for as far as remember...


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Regards

Urami

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<urami>
http://www.Flashfugitive.com
</urami>

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