Flash exporting/publishing time

Question

What are the main reasons for having ridiculously long export times for a simple flash movie to swf? I have no unnecessary images or symbols, everything possible is set to lower than low and it still takes 10 minutes and upwards to export a 30 second animation at 24 fps. I have even created a new fla and pasted everything in there, to find out if it isn't maybe just a bug in flash. All other animations I've exported take a normal amount of time.

System specifications: 1GB DDR2 RAM Intel Pentium D 3.4GHz

Should I upgrade my system?

Could it have something to do with having many symbols within symbols?

EDIT: Filesize of fla is 1.3 MB and swf is 500 KB. So not too big.

Answer 1

This is not average for Flash. Normally, the only cause for long export times is that you're exporting a lot of stuff, some of which you may not mean to be exporting.

Does your animation have audio? If you imported audio into your FLA, then that sound has to be encoded every time you export, and that takes a while. The best way to deal with this is, in publish settings, set your audio compression to "Raw". This will publish the audio uncompressed, so it will increase the file size but publish instantly. (Of course when you are ready to export the finished product, you'll want to return the settings to a compressed format for the final export.) Alternately, you can put the audio in a separate file (SWF, MP3, etc) and load it at runtime.

Another common mistake is to accidentally embed a large font. If you have dynamic text fields using embedded fonts, it's possible to embed an entire font, which for unicode fonts can take several minutes. It's easy to check if you're doing something like this - in publish settings, turn on "generate size report". Then export, and check the size report for any large pieces of content that you didn't mean to be exporting.

It's hard to say more without knowing what kind of content you're exporting, but if you have one piece of content that takes much longer to export than similar pieces of content, then the cause is probably something along these lines.

Answer 2

The first thing you should always try to do to solve this problem is a very simple one, though it's not really documented anyone.

File -> Save and Compact

Your movies can bloat larger and larger with various cruft and leftover library elements that are no longer needed, but still kept in the .FLA file, and which can slow down your export. This command forces Flash to essentially rebuild your FLA and get rid of all this "fat."

Of course this isn't a fix-all, you may still have other problems even after running this. But if you want to cut down on SWF filesize OR export time, this is the first step, and one that people should be aware of.

Answer 3

unfortunately this is pretty average with flash.

You can check out this post on actionscript.org which talks about splitting up your project so save on compile time.

Back in the AS2 days an open source compiler called MTASC which dramatically reduced the compile time. It has since turned into Haxe with AS2, AS3, Javascript, PHP, and Neko virtual machine all using the same syntax. The syntax used is similar to C++.

** EDIT ** Sorry I read the above as 10 seconds, not 10 minutes... sorry. ^_^