Rendering flash in After Effects
by FLOPBUSTER
on
Nov 4, 2006 at 8:40:54 pm
Hello I am new to the forum. I have been using After Effect off and on for a little while now. I get better and better each day. I am just wondering why flash renders are so big inside of after effects. I made a 30 second little banner add. It was like 8 to 10 megs big. If I lower the quality all the way down it is like 2 or 3 megs with horrible quality. What is going on with this? I appreciate any help, thanks. :)
Re: Rendering flash in After Effects by yikesmikes on Nov 4, 2006 at 9:59:58 pm
Lee Brimelow has a tut for going from AE to Flash, and he explains how to keep files small, what you want is about 60% of the way through the video tut. Small files = vector files, anything rasterized (most effects) are huge. If you stick to Illustrator files (as layers in AE), solids with masks, text, and a very few effects (like Audio Waveform and Audio Spectrum) you get vectors and small swf files. Not the best of news, but this might improve in the future since Adobe acquired Flash (and Flash can use Blur (rasterlike effect) and more via the Flash Player at playtime) so maybe Adobe will make AE more Flash compatible, size-wise, but for now you stuck with the limitations listed.
One interesting thing is that if you output a swf from AE (with "Ignore Unsupported Features" and get your vector small swf file), then bring it into Flash and Publish that, the same file will be substantially smaller (sometimes dramatically smaller). Evidently Flash optimizes the same file better than AE makes it originally.
As an alternative if you have lots of raster effects from AE, you might want to output your file as an flv, Flash's video, very usable in Flash.
Re: Rendering flash in After Effects by Mylenium on Nov 4, 2006 at 10:54:16 pm
like yikesmikes said - AE will rasterize features that cannot be exported as vectors. Since it writes out legacy SWF types (equal to Flash 6), each single frame gets embedded as a JPEG or PNG image which add up substantially to filesize. A better way is to export a uncompressed clip or FLV and let Flash handle the rest (assuming you have access to it, that is).
