Movie Architecture

[raznov]

My problem is this... I have a very large .swf and .fla.

I usually organize my movies into smaller movies, use the loadmovie action to control them, and place loaders on each movie as needed. However, for this piece, it is a tutorial of sorts and my client would like it to all fully load before the user can see any of it. Since the user can explore the piece in a nonlinear format, it is not possible to load the movie partly before having it play as they may click on a button that takes them to the last section of the movie, as their first option.

The .swf is almost 2meg, and the .fla is 18 meg organized by scenes, both are obviously quite large for flash.

I have made everything I can a symbol, and optimized everything else.

My question...
Am I working correctly or is there another way to organize this project?

 

[rgstewart]

I don't know about anyone else, but I personally would never even consider putting a SWF that size on the web. But I guess it has a lot to do with your target group. If it's for a group who (by and large) use broadband, then you might get away with it. But if it's for home users with 56K connections, forget it.

Also, unless your client is a multimedia specialist, I would politely explain the purpose of partial download. Even if the SWF is to be viewed on a broadband connection, it is still better practise (IMHO) to break it up for download. The user can choose what they want to see and ignore the rest.

Think of this scenario ... I am fairly knowledgeable about the topic this tutorial SWF is about, but there's a little bit under "Advanced Usage" that I'd like to see. I'm on a 56Kb home connection, and I'm faced with a whopping 2Mb SWF download. I, like many others, find another tutorial.

However, if the SWF were broken into sections, even sections 200Kb in size, I might stick around to see what I'm after. My point is if you break it up, the user can control what they download and how long they spend doing it. If you make one BIG movie, you take that option away.