There are a number of different ways to produce movies that are faster. A more traditional way is to optimise your FLAs, and make like Jack the Ripper at a hen's night and cut bandwidth intensive operations and objects out of your file. After also optimising your sound and images you should be left with a lean, mean entertaining machine.
The next step, or should I say your first step to designing a Flash movie should be the conceptual design - how you will put it all together to ensure speed and minimisation of download time. One technique employed is to cache SWF files, particularly movies that are used repeatedly throughout a site. This technique minimises download times because the file has already been downloaded and still exists on your visitor's system and thus doesn't require downloading to use it again.
In a SWF file that loads multiple movies some people use the UNLOAD movie function. This deletes the loaded movie from the browser cache. I wouldn't recommend this approach especially for a movie that will be used again. In addition I wouldn't recommend loading your movies into "levels", it's a lot less handy than using location/target. To see what I mean, read on.
A way around loading and unloading movies continually is simply, to put an empty movie clip on the top left corner of your stage, and call the instance "dummy" for example. Then, in your actions, you can make flash load any SWF file into this Movie Clip (Load Movie into location, target /dummy), and send tell target actions to it with the path /dummy.
Next, put an empty keyframe at the beginning of the SWF so you can load with a stop action. This will also allow you to make the loaded SWF disappear. To do this instead of using the unload movie function, simply tell the Movie Clip (/dummy) to Go to frame 1 and Stop. The movie will disappear.
To load another SWF into this location, simply overwrite it... The previous SWF loaded will still be in the browser cache and will appear instantly if you load it again into the location/target /dummy.
So there you have it, a simple yet effective way to cut down on download time and speed up your movie!
Good luck and happy flashing!
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