frames per second

#1

Hey flash-people :slight_smile:

I’ve been thinking about what FPS to tune my project to, but I’m not sure I understand Flash well enough to make an educated decision. It seems the “standard”-ish rate is 12 or 15 fps, which… makes sense… it’s certainly enough to provide the illusion of movement. I get that number from misc. online tutorials and people around the office here.

Anyway, my current understanding of Flash makes me belive it’ll give a much better presentation if I yank it up to 24 or 30. See, in my case I’m making a (supposedly) clean interface with thin lines and a dab of movement. Ie. there’ll be lots of tweening going on, many of the lines seems to do just fine with 3 or 4 keyframes to do their thing.

And that’s when I’m thinking there seems to be two ways to go about this: Either I
A) set my project to the classic (?) 12 fps, and animate a line going from outside the workspace to it’s final position in, say, 12 frames, or
B) I set the project to 24 fps, and animate the line moving from start to finish in 24 frames.

So my question is, I think the 24 fps option will make the line move a lot smoother? And without any size-penalty to speak off… I mean, it’d still just be the two keyframes, just more tweening in between… any increase in size should be extremly minimal?

Does that make sense? I don’t know if that theory holds water at all, it just seems it ought to work that way… again, this is in the context of an interface that features simple-ish hand-made animation using few control-points. …well, hell, even if I were to include a 24fps 3D animation converted to Flash, one could just go in and clean every other frame and it should take up the same space as it would’ve done in 12 fps?

Any sort of light shedded on the issue will (obviously :)) be very appriciated… maybe this is completly old-hat knowledge and I’ve just managed to miss out whenever it became public knowledge :slight_smile:

[edit] Oh, I see my search-fu was somewhat lacking, I’ve now found a similar-ish thread… still, it’s a year old, maybe stuff has happened since. The conclusion back then was that increasing the framerate does, infact, increase the filesize. Each frame weighing in at about 12 bytes. Doesn’t seem too bad. I’d still like to hear what peoples take on framerates are though, so I guess I’ll leave the topic open :slight_smile: [/edit]

#2

higher frame rate always looks better, even if its just a simple animation. My site is set to 30fps.

nothing more frustrating than having an already slow animation or GUI running at 12fps

:slight_smile:

#3

For scrolling objects and simple linear movement of geometric shapes, higher framerates produce smoother animation. Most computers cannot handle a framerate high enough (with vector graphics) to completely smooth things out, though. The human eye can detect over 70 fps. The smoothness of lower framerates comes from other tricks like motion blur, etc.

For character animation, 15 fps is plenty. If you think the old Loony Toons were smooth, they were done at 30 fps on twos. That is the equivelant of 15 fps on ones. The key to smooth character animation comes in the drawing. Well-placed drawings will look smooth at 15 or even 12 fps, but poorly-placed drawings will look bad at any framerate and will never smooth out.

Good luck,
Dain

#4

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