Recipe 17.9. Compressing Sounds in Your Movie (Optimizing Quality and File Size)ProblemYou want to add compression to the sounds in your Flash movie to optimize both the quality of the sounds as well as the file size of the exported movie. SolutionAdjust the compression settings for each sound and/or the global compression settings for the movie. DiscussionHow you choose to compress and export the sound in your Flash movies makes a tremendous difference in the quality and file size of the resulting movie. And Flash gives you quite a lot of control over how you want to handle the sounds. You can affect the compression for each sound individually, and you can also apply moviewide, global sound compression settings. You can apply settings to each sound individually in order to assure that you maximize the quality of your sounds while also minimizing the required file size. Because each sound is generally quite different from another, no one setting will necessarily work best for all sounds. For example, you can generally apply much more compression to sounds that are voice-only than you can to sounds that include music. In order to apply compression settings to each sound individually:
When you export your Flash movie, each Event or Start synchronized sound exports with its individual settings. However, for a given Flash movie, there can be only one sound stream. Therefore, Flash automatically mixes all your streamed sounds into a single stream, and applies a single compression setting to the whole stream. Flash determines what settings to use by applying the settings from whichever streamed sound has the highest settings. When discussing the highest settings, I am referring to the settings that result in the largest file size. By setting the compression and export options for each sound in your library, you can create the most effective results it terms of optimized sound quality and file size. However, there are also reasons to apply global sound settings. For one thing, if there are many (or all) sounds in your movie to which you want to apply the same setting, it is more efficient to leave each of the individual sounds' compression types set to Default, and apply a global setting. To set the global sound settings:
Because Flash applies different settings to stream and event sounds, make sure to modify the global settings for both Stream Audio and Event Audio. And remember that the global settings are only applied to sounds that have default compression applied to them individually. Otherwise, the individual sound compression settings take precedence over the global settings. Another good reason to apply global sound settings is that you can choose to override the individual sound compression settings. This approach is particularly useful if you want to quickly export a movie with different sound settings without having to modify each individual sound's properties. For example, if you have applied settings to your movie in order to optimize it for the Web, but you want to also quickly export a version with higher sound quality for a CD-ROM, you can choose to do so with a single checkbox option. In the Publish Settings window, check the Override Sound Settings option, and Flash will automatically apply the global sound settings to all sounds. |
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