Improve your techniques with these great Flash tips!

Halve the size of your flash animations, then scale up the dimensions of the movie (using the width and height attributes) when you embed it in the web page

Keep a library of pixel fonts available, so that your movie text remains sharp and readable when scaled

Try to keep objects made up of lots of vectors, on seperate layers.

Instead of redrawing shapes, make common shapes into symbols and drag them from the library each time you need a new one. Then use the color effects pop-up to alter the appearance of the symbols 'instance'.

Always try to view your Flash movie on a low spec machine.

Scaling multiple objects from very small to very large can slow down the animations framerate on slower machines.

For large movies with short animation sections, and lots of still bits, break the animated parts into Movie Clips. They have theie own timelines independent of the main movie timeline, and can be called as required.

Label your layers. As your Flash movie grows it can start to become very confusing.

If you intend your movie to stream on the web, keep the initial frames as small as possible

Don't place animated objects on the same layer as still object, this will make playback smoother and file sizes smaller

Transform simple bitmaps to vectors using Modify/Trace bitmap

As with HTML, try to use the minimum number of fonts. Use simple fonts rather than decorative fonts, and avoid breaking the font apart as this will increase the file size.

Test your movie, then use View/Bandwidth profiler to see size and framerate. See how it streams with different modem speeds using the Control option

When working on complex animations, speed Flash up by switching to Outlines mode.

Leave a few blank frames at the start of your movie so that you can add a pre-loader later.

If using a Flash intro to a HTML site, give people a 'skip intro' option from the start.