final thoughts on sound tracks in flash

[PantherRun]

Again hello;

This is a 'clean up' sound question.

A short history - i'm the one that maxed out the 16000 frame limit, and with your help, learned how to break that movie in far many smaller movie clips to make it work.

But, since i'm in the process of creating nearly 150 movies for this project in the coming years, and since not all movies will be testing the (near-sighted?) limits of the flash developers,(the 2nd one was only say 3000 frames long), i find myself a bit lost in terms of how to handle the soundtracks of short movies VS long.

So let me ask you some questions. Please if you can be specific.

First this site is for BROADBAND ONLY and since where i am creating I am trapped in the dial-up world, i need to ask... for those of you who are using broadband, and creating sites for broadband only, IS THERE A DIFFERENCE between setting your soundtracks to Event VS Stream?
Or does everything really arrive at about the same time?

Next, under broadband, and using that 2nd 3000 frame movie as an example, is there a reason that the soundtrack NEEDS TO BE KEPT in its own movie clip for loading? I ask this because, the way it's set up now, the movie is created seperate of the soundtrack, and i only get to hear them all working together when I publish.

It was "better" when i made one long main timeline that held eveything: images, VOs, soundtrack. It created a more unified product that as the developer i could - in realtime-see how my creative decisions we're jelling.

So, as long as i keep it under the 16000 frame limit, (and keep in mind this is only to be a broadband product), is there anything wrong with having just one LONG movie?
Asked another way: does broadband now allow huge flash movies to stream at an ACCEPTABLE RATE, or must i still continue to chop them into bits?

thanks for your time,
Hoss

 

[oldnewbie]

Since I'm not really in this business, you can take my answers for what they're worth... Meaning that they might not be the best ones! Just the results of my playing around with Flash without any precise goals...

IMHO, if sync between sound and the video is relatively important, than a stream would be the only way to go, even with a broadband connection. One other problem that might occur (don't know if you knew this...), is that apparently, sync after 1000 frames may well start drifting, so it's really not below 16,000 frames or even 3000 frames clips, but more under 1000 frames clips you should be looking at.

As for your "work in progress" question, you could work individual +/- 1000 frames sections as if they were individual seperates movies, building everything on stage...
And when your done, convert these individual movies to movie clips and stitch them together in a main movie...

My 2 cents!

 

[PantherRun]

Thanks oldnewbie;

Maintaining Sync is not as important to the movie as download time using broadband.

So, a follow up question if I may:

If i had a, say, a 3000 frame movie, made a copy, kept one copy the long, 1 timeline movie, took the other copy and broke it up into say 10 movie clips, then had someone using a broadband connection download both...

Would they notice any discernable difference (in an aggravating way) in downloading time between the 2 movies in today's broadband world?

Has anyone out there ever conducted this experiment?

Hoss