Flash CS4 crawls with pasted Illustrator assets

Question

I'm working on a flash project that incorporates a lot of artwork done in Illustrator CS4. Thus far, I've been copy-pasting directly from Illustrator into Flash, and when the images are fairly simple (which they have been until now), this goes pretty smoothly. But now I'm trying to bring in some larger and more complex illustrations with many more paths, and flash is choking. It takes forever for the paths to import, and after they do, flash becomes unusably slow to respond for actions as simple as zooming and scrolling, forget selecting many groups of paths and converting them to symbols (which is what I need to do, en masse).

My machine is a fast dual core with 6gb of RAM, so I don't think that's the issue. Does anyone have ideas for alternative importing techniques, optimizations within illustrator, anything at all that will make this more manageable?

Thanks!

-Dane

Answer 1

In the View menu select Preview Mode->Outlines or Fast.

Answer 2

When vector images from illustrator are complex they require allot of processing to perform zooming, scrolling, etc...

For small graphics vectors are great but I would try converting to raster images (JPG) the complex ones before importing to flash. You will loose some quality when trying to zoom, resize, etc... but it should speed up your flash.

Another option would be to have a raster background and draw with Flash vectors directly on the screen if it is something that needs to scale correctly.