Flash FLA file size becoming huge for no good reason

Question

Q1: What is the reason for the enormass bloating of FLA file size, when many edits and saves are made to a FLA file, yet assets are not being added to the library?

Q2: What is the best technique to keep FLA files smaller in size? (with the problem described below. I am not talking about published SWF files or asset management)

Over many edits and many saves of my FLA files, they become 30 times the size on disk from where they start out. Example 750k can get as high as 34mb. In the past "save and compact" used to fill the role of reducing FLA file sizes but now that feature is gone.

The issue is discussed here but does not provide a satisfactory solution or reason: http://www.xllusion.net/ed/2010/05/04/no-save-and-compact-on-flash-cs5/

Extra Details:

When I save as a CS4 file then back to CS5 the file becomes much smaller after it has become bloated, BUT I take a risk every time I do this that the file will become corrupted (I've had corruptions happen).

I have read that files which were created in CS5 and are never in the format of CS4 don't have this problem, but I find that theory unlikely since I have tried to follow this rule to no success.

I have also read that every FLA file tracks its "history" of assets. So adding and removing assets to the library will sometimes cause bloating because old assets that are removed from the library remain in the FLA file. This seems bogus because there is no purpose to this, but could be an indication of a bug in Adobe Flash Professional CS5, and CS5.5.

Personal details: the files I am editing contain personally created flash components, images, audio, many symbols (20+) but no embedded video.

For me personally, this bloating is a problem because I'm dealing with hundreds of flash FLA files that should be about 1-4mb in size but are instead much larger. The overall effect is that I end up with gigabytes of files instead of hundreds of mbs.

Thanks so much for your help!!!

Answer 1

I ran into the same problem. The assets I was importing were a fraction of the size of the FLA.

The solution is to create a new FLA and copy the assets from the library of your bloated FLA into the new one. Save the new one and you should see a significant file size decrease. This bug has been around a long time (at least since CS3) and I would have hoped Adobe would have resolved it by now.

Answer 2

Most of the time you can just do "save as", Flash seems to keep a few copies of your library for your undo history and forgets to strip this out when you do a normal save, doing "saves as" will reduce it massively, Ive seen flash files go from 300mb to 500kb using this technique.

Answer 3

The FLA File is your library file, the only way to reduce the fla file size is to delete assets inside your project you dont need at all and reduce embedding assets.

Sometimes when your making a SWF you might say import an asset but then decide to delete it or not use it.Generally this item now is added into your FLA library so you will need to remove it from here aswell.

Also you could load dynamicaly, pictures, audio ect..this will reduce the file size but these files will still need to be present in another folder.

other times if im importing pictures i make sure the image is exactly what i want in size for instance, If imported a picture 400x400 but the display size is only 64x64 in the swf. I would edit this image in another program to shrink it to the exact size 64x64 then import it to my FLA.if need be i could reduce the quality down aswell

There are tips and other ways to reduce this size but overall this file has uncompressed assets, the idea is your SWF is the compressed movie.

Always check your library this will justify the file size.

Creating vectors, instead of embedding logo's/images or big backgrounds and animating with librarys will keep your project file low so if you were to draw vector images for backgrounds/ or what not instead of importing images this will reduce the filesize aswell.

Streaming video instead of embedding has its advantages, firstly your project file is smaller and also streaming can load quicker as it only needs a portion to start playing its content.whilst load dynamically will take longer to start to play as it will need to load the complete movie.Dynamically will still keep your movie smaller in size

Answer 4

I reduce my huge files to 20% ie a project (all fla files) summed up to 558 mb but after doing these two step it reduced to only 80 mb.

1.The way to reduce the fla file size is to delete assets inside your project you dont need. 2.Doing "saves as" will reduce file massively.