Any tips for optimizing photos for Flash?

Question

I'm curious if anyone has any great tips for preparing photos
to be used in a Flash website.
I'm very familiar with Photoshop and I've designed many
non-Flash sites so I know the general approach for preparing photos
for the web. I've done a few Flash sites which are heavily image
based... no images galleries but just large photos used in the
layouts.
In the interest of keeping the file size down to a minimum,
I'm bringing the quality of my jpegs down to 45 or even 30 in
Photoshop (this usually makes them around 40K +- 10K each).
Needless to say, they lack the sharp quality of a good image when
brought down to this size.
Lately, I've seen some really great Flash sites that have
very large images in their layout The photos are very clear and the
site moves smoothly/quickly.
So, I guess my question is two-fold:
1) What can I do to maximize the quality of the photos
without compromising the speed of the site?
2) As a general rule, what is the range of quality for photos
brought from Photoshop into Flash? (jpeg, psd, gif?)
thanks for any insight!

Answer 1

Is this typical?
I just exported a background image of bricks (which needs to
look pretty
clear) and the export on my jpg was 61KB, my png export was
361KB.
Should I use the *.png anyway? It doesn't look, to me, like
there's much
difference between the two.
I don't expect to have the site scaling -should be pretty
static.
TIA,
Jon
"Nickels55" <[email protected]> wrote in message
news:els0r1$h4r$[email protected]..
>I like to use uncompressed .PNG files. That way you can
change the quality
>in
> Flash very easily and you can use transparency with
them. If you want to
> change
> the quality of the final output you can do it in the
publish settings in
> Flash.
>