Caching SWF files for Faster Movies

There are a number of different ways to produce movies that are faster. A more traditional way is to optimise your FLAs, and make like Jack the Ripper at a hen's night and cut bandwidth intensive operations and objects out of your file. After also optimising your sound and images you should be left with a lean, mean entertaining machine.

The next step, or should I say your first step to designing a Flash movie should be the conceptual design - how you will put it all together to ensure speed and minimisation of download time. One technique employed is to cache SWF files, particularly movies that are used repeatedly throughout a site. This technique minimises download times because the file has already been downloaded and still exists on your visitor's system and thus doesn't require downloading to use it again.

In a SWF file that loads multiple movies some people use the UNLOAD movie function. This deletes the loaded movie from the browser cache. I wouldn't recommend this approach especially for a movie that will be used again. In addition I wouldn't recommend loading your movies into "levels", it's a lot less handy than using location/target. To see what I mean, read on.