Regarding Framerates...

#1

Hi all!

Long time since I posted here… Anyhoo, been getting down and dirty with flash and have even made a website and gotten paid for it using a few flash elements here and there…
I recall once reading somewhere(maybe even in the Flash MX help, lol) that 12 fps is the ideal framerate for web animations. I personally find this speed a bit slow, especially if you want to create really smooth movement and flicker effects. I use between 30 and 60 though depending what I’m dealing with.
It seems to me though that the computer that someone views a flash in plays an important part in the playback though too… I have this spinning logo at 12 fps and it looks fine on my PC which is relatively powerful but on a 3 year-old laptop there is quite a bit of lag between each frame, even when I up the framerate to a generous 30. Other animations are viewed fine on this computer but the logo is in a page that is a big SWF and other pages just have little flash elements…

My question is what sort of framerates do you guys use for different situations and how it pays off on other less powerful PCs and if this power has a big influence or not over playback performance.

Carl :beer:

#2

20-25 should be the max. you’re not going to notice the difference after that. after that it’s going to hog the cpu like no tomorrow. it also depends on what is on the stage and how you are presenting it. which really bogs down the speed depending upon what kind of processing power the viewer has.

but to answer your question framerate does have a big impact. when a swf is being played sluggish it’s the computer’s capabilities and not the framerate itself.

#3

There has been some previous discussion on this topic. I mentioned a few factors which I have discovered affect the way I design and animate in Flash. Try a search.

#4

a framerate of 30 is fine…tbh if its all vector anims then its pure cpu load…

the only reason to use really high fps was for running scripts to control anims quickly, now we can use setInterval that becomes less of a problem (though annoyingly setInterval is still affected by the fps of the movie).

dragging things for example can be made frame rate independant with a

onMouseMove = function ()
{
updateAfterEvent();
}

command…this works for scrollers etc, but again puts more load on the cpu than normal because you are scrubbing the movie from memory everytime.

the reality check is that flash can take anything down if you are sloppy with how you build stuff (try developing for a nokia 9210 and you can take it down with 2 onEnterFrame events running at the same time :confused: ).

if its for a portfolio consider the kinda of people you want to be looking at it - if they are studio leads etc then they will have a good pc to view it on, so you have some room to work. dont always go lowest denominator if its not 100% neccessary and it compromises what you want to achieve

#5

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.