30K Banner Limits
by Alex Stephens
on
Oct 10, 2007 at 4:03:39 pm
We are creating a 30K flash banner for a client but having trouble getting the swf file down to 30k with limited animation. We've been following the advice about keeping PNG/JPEG files really small and cropping images to fit and keeping the images sizes down in the library but still can only get the size of the swf file to 47k. We animate the file in Flash or AE and still have problems with the file size. What is the trick? Is the 30K limit the initial file size with additional objects loaded from a directory? Is there a program that compresses the file down while keeping the quality there?
Any new tricks or links to a better solution would help!
Re: 30K Banner Limits by Brian McGovern on Oct 10, 2007 at 4:54:31 pm
Ask the for some leeway on the 30K, some people are OK with 32 or even 35K. But next time try do as much in Flash as possible and import less. Png's are out and jpg's will probably have alot of artifacts.
Try placing all your elements in a folder before you start in Flash and see what the total weight is. It helps t narrow stuff down.
Re: 30K Banner Limits by Alex Stephens on Oct 12, 2007 at 10:53:17 pm
Thanks guys for all the feedback and tips. It's been interesting finding out all the little tricks to keep the weight down on the file sizes. We also started working in After Effects for banners but realized that you have to stay in Flash to be in the 30k area. We've found that jpegs can be smaller and cleaner than png if you import them correctly into the library in some case.
If there's any other little tips for keeping the file sizes down let us know on this thread. There's a lot of interest.
Re: 30K Banner Limits by Chris Lupetti on Oct 13, 2007 at 12:16:09 am
Have you gone to the Flash publishing panel and selected the JPEG quality options? There you can decrease quality of the JPEG. This will decrease the size of the SWF once it's published. However, the trade off is poorer quality images. But you can decrease it just enough so most untrained eyes wouldn't notice. You can also decrease sound quality there as well. In addition, you can decrease PNGS, JPEGS and Gifs in the Library panel by selecting their Properties.
I have been designing literally hundreds of Flash banners over the past several years. Almost all of them are in the 140K to 200K range. This is a lot, I know. But with the rate of bandwidth these days my clients are willing to take the risk.
Re: 30K Banner Limits by Alex Stephens on Oct 15, 2007 at 8:14:54 pm
Thanks for your comments. We have been using the JPEG quality options in the publishing area and yes it cuts down the size but the balance between files size and quality is the trick. Some of the sites we are working with are requiring a initial 30K file size because of their page download to begin with. We've been able to create banners around 140K but the 30K file size has been a challenge to keep the animation elements in without killing the quality.
Re: 30K Banner Limits by RossGerbasi on Oct 25, 2007 at 7:50:47 pm
Hey Alex,
I dunno about that jazz man. Our Clients would flip, then laugh in our face, if we came at them with a 100K+ banner. Man they get upset if its 40K.
We go the external load route with banners. So if we need some extra space see what you can split off and load later. Usually this will require a user interaction. "Click here to view my amazing banner". Then there is all sortsa leeway on this load. You can argue the user wants to see your amazing banner, so they will be willing to wait for a bit.
Tips on the 30k inital load though.. hmmmmm
Crop images if ya can. Anything you can pull off is better.
Try to stick with as few fonts as possible. One would be the best
Sometimes replacing an image with a vector can help ya out. This is tough to pull off most of the time, but worth thinking about.
Oh a neat trick that has worked for me before is replace your PNG's with JPEG's. The trick here is knowing when you can pull this off. A little jpeg compression from photoshop and then recompress in flash can keep good quality and lower the file size. The catch is the transparency.
To get around this look for images with simple transparency shapes. We had to do a baseball banner and it saved a lot of file size to use a JPEG in place of a transparent Baseball PNG. Then you wanna use a simple circle mask in flash to get your transparency back.
SO look for images you can mask the transparency out of. Can save ya in a bind.
On a side note, remember your banner will probably not be the only ad on the page. So the <30K limit is more about page weight then your banner weight. Sites can have like 3 or 4 of these things going at once, those 30K loads can start to add up. So try to concern yourself more with being the best and getting that user interaction :) Just cant put so much filesize into something the user hasn't really come to the page to see..
Sorry but as sweet ass as your banner will be, I doubt it will be driving traffic to the site :) "OH man did you see that sweet banner" doesn't come around to often!
Re: 30K Banner Limits by Nolan Maratas on Jan 28, 2008 at 3:59:06 pm
I'm running into the same problem. I even tried creating a banner shell that's 25kb and dynamically loaded 3 jpg's from a web server. We still received complaints of slow loading. How are you doing external banner loading? Are you loading external swf's or jpg's at all? Any help would be much appreciated.
