Scaling swf in Dreamweaver

[leanne]

Hello,

I'm hoping to get some advice for my nearly finished website. The area I am struggling with is getting the page to resize so that it fits the browser window without losing so much image quality. I have designed my website in Flash CS4 to dimensions 800x600 but when I preview it it is quite small.

I have exported the file from Flash as a swf and am using Dreamweaver to upload my site. I have set the width and height to 100% which fills the window but looses a lot of the image quality. The images used are 72dpi.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

Leanne

 

[lauralil]

Hi,

Web isn't my field but I think the problem here is that it will be resizing to a much bigger scale than what you had originally designed.

Basically dreamweaver is making it bigger than what Flash exported it to so you will get a pixellated site.

I'm sure someone with better web skills than I will be able to advise your further.

 

[IS-James]

One of the benefits of flash is that it can easily be made to scale to any browser size. It always amazes me that so many people who build websites in flash lock it down to a tiny rectangle in the middle of the screen with tiny font sizes.

The scalability of flash is down to it's vector based construction. If you build a flash site just using vectors with no photography or rasterized objects then it will scale perfectly without any degradation of quality. What won't scale are any rasterized objects that are included in the design. Your 72dpi images will just be stretched out and look worse and worse the more they are stretched.

There are a couple of ways you can work around this.

The first one is to use vectors whenever possible. Instead of rasterizing graphics in Photoshop before pulling them into flash create them within flash. If you need more control or aren't used to working with graphics in flash then use Illustrator. You can pull layouts from Illustrator straight into flash without rasterizing them.

If you do need to use rasterized elements, and unless your site doesn't include a single photograph you will be using them, then you need to approach them in a slightly different way. Instead of playing out the photos to a standard size, bring them into flash at a size that looks ok at the maximum size you expect your site to be viewed. By doing this when the site is stretched over a larger screen the images will still look good.

Of course you are limited by file sizes, so it is a balance between maintaining the quality of the images and final file size of the project. A good rule of thumb is to assume that most people will be using a screen with a resolution of 1024x768 or 1280x1024 pixels. Even if people have larger screens they probably won't be maximising the browser over the full screen but viewing more than one window side by side.

Hopefully that answers your question. If you have problems then let me know and I will try and help out, and don't forget to let us know the address of the site when it is finished so we can take a look at your hard work!