flickering layers, re-optimizing layers-pleeeeze help

[moonaleesa]

This is probably a stupid question but my english is not that good , so i couldnt find an anwer by searching the forum. I hope you can understand me and help. That would be great.

I made a pretty complex animation of a talking man. I worked very hard to get my illustrator file into anime studio. Now the animation is pretty compley, but finished and looks very good.

The problem is, when i export it as an swf it has so many bugs!
Sometimes you see layers that disappear for a moment or some layers disappear completly. Why is that?

And the most important thing:
I did it all in vector because i needed to have a veeeery small file. Now the file is pretty big. Why is that? I did it all in vectors?!
As an swf it should be very small- right?

Another question i have: In the beginning i had only one layer with a small red dot ( not optimized) and afetr working a while, suddenly a of layers have a small red dot? How can i optimize the layers again? maybe that has to do with the solution???

I´m pretty desperate- i hope one of you guys can help me out?
Sorry for my strangenglish

Lisa

[slowtiger]

1. The red dot indicates an optimized layer which will be treated as a symbol in Flash.
2. An Illustrator file is probably not the best way to start a character if you're aiming at a very small file size.
3. If you really need to optimize stuff for small file size, you need to do that in Flash. AS uses the SWF format only as a container to get the vector information over to Flash. AS doesn't use the many tricks of Flash, like symbols and movie clips, to keep files very small.

[Mikdog]

Yep. Far as I can remember AS kind of saves each frame of animation in SWF, so instead of optimised vectors getting pushed around, you have a flash file that has every frame saved as vector information, like each frame is a keyframe with data for all the vectors, so you end up with a large file.

[moonaleesa]

oh crap...that´s bad, i guess i have to start all over. So it seems anime studio is not good for small webanimation after all...
Thank you very much for your help.
Bye!
Lisa

[slowtiger]

AS is good for animation, it's just not the right tool for really optimizing your output in terms of filesize.

I use AS and Flash both, so for me it's not a problem to create animation in AS and tweak it further in Flash.