As previously announced, Optimaze the flash compression tool, has finally made its way onto our computers earning a valid place in our developer toolboxes. I recently got my hands on a review copy and so ive written a couple of hundred words about the program, my experiences with it and why i think you should have a copy already. Read on….
Sometime last year i recieved an email asking for flash programmers to work on a new flash based application, not thinking much of it, i forwarded the request on to my colleague at that time, Jamie MacDonald - Nooflat. Later on that year at the New York City Flashfoward Conference, me and jamie walked up to a particular stall in the exhibition hall to be greeted by Adrian, who was promoting the release of a new SWF Compression tool made with flash under the company name Skwishworks. We had a look at a demonstration of the product working and the final output was amazingly shocking, hugely reduced filesizes without any loss of quality. The tool was probably the talk of the conference, with everybody getting excited about the release, which at that time was simply announced as “coming soon”. Time passed and there was still no Skwishworks, the next Flashfoward conference stages the same exhibition from SkwishWorks still promoting the product and announcing the release date, yet again, as “coming soon”. The last conference i attended in San Fransico, saw the same product, formerly known as Skwishworks being promoted under a new name; Optimaze. There was still no release date. Two months after the conference i receieved a press release for Optimaze from Electric Rain the makers of Swift 3d, finally announcing the products release. I was now confused about the company and the products name, so i just assumed the Electric Rain had bought the company previously known as Skishworks, but it wasnt until a couple of weeks later when i actually visited the products website that i found out it was actually Ideaworks 3d the makers of Vecta3d that had bought Skwishworks and Electric Rain were just the primary distributors for the US. Anyway after all the confusion, i finally got my hands on a review copy of the product and im now going to give you my two cents. I am not going to be biased because i just happened to eat a chinese with the makers/promoters of the product in san fransisco, which was actually the most minging food ever to make its way past my teeth, might i add. Im going to give my honest opinion.
Optimaze is simply a program that compresses flash movies(.swfs) without any loss in graphical quality, as a direct result of the compression you get dramatically reduced filesizes which will come in handy for those hefty download times we often encounter on the internet.
Immediatley upon opening Optimaze i started to worry somewhat after seeing a large transition typical of that you see created with flash, after one more click i was once again quite shocked by the bright orange colours and the flash based interface which houses the core of the functionality, my personal opinion is that it makes it look fancy but amateuristic, but a change from the norm, the grey dullness that the windows api provides, was also refreshing. It turns out that the actual complexity of this application is far from amateuristic.
The first thing i did was to try and optimise some of the animations i created when i first started using flash all those years ago, the movie is displayed in the center of the program and takes up a large propotion of the programs space, the various gadgets and gizmos are tooked around the sides and at the bottom of the interface which focuses the attention more on the flash movie you are currently editing and makes it very easy for you to see the changes you are making in realtime. The flash movie you are editing is constantly playing as it would in a browser which i personally think, is distracting. At this point, by accident i happened to click and hold, then move my mouse which unleashed something i wasnt expecting, a zoom feature, which smoothly scales the whole of the flash movie you are currently editing, a very neat addition for detailed viewing of the graphical changes made to your flash movies, the only worrying thing is that the whole program suddenly flicks into low quality mode which slightly shifts the whole interfaces graphics upwards, when you have finished your zoom(released the mouse), it shifts back into high quality mode once more and the whole interface shunts back into its original position.
It was time to start clicking around and playing with the various features and menus, the first feature i messed with was the symbols editor, a very cool feature which gives you the ability to browse through the individual symbols in your movie and apply seperate compression settings to each and everyone individually, regardless of the global compression settings you apply to the whole movie. If the symbol has a timeline you can apply different compression settings to the symbol on different frames, aswell as having the standard video controls, stop, play, to the end, to the beginning, back one frame and forward one frame which makes it easy for you to view the animation frame by frame or as a whole. The symbols editor provides compression inheritance, which sounds complicated but is really quite simple, each symbol can inherit its compression settings from either the main movie(global compression) as i mentioned earlier, from the current symbols immediate parent(the movieclip in which the symbol resides compression settings) or have its compressions settings edited individually, you also have the option to apply no compression to the specific symbol. These settings are all set by clicking one of three buttons next to the symbol. The symbols editor can display the list of symbols sorted by name, or sorted by filesize. I think the symbols editor, would be one hugely appreciated and valuable addition to the flash mx authoring tool itself, being able to find out the filesize of each symbol in the library aswell as being able to specify gzlib compression on or off for each symbol would be wicked.
Next was the preferences panel, found in the options menu. In this panel you can change the size at which the flash movie you are currently editing, is displayed, change the background colour of the current flash movie using an rgb colour slider which happens to be too fiddly for my likings, a colour pallete would have been much more appropriate i think and you can also mute all the sounds in the current movie which i can forsee to be a handy little addition when it comes to individually editing lots of different symbols and movies with sound on their timelines. How annoying would a looping sound be when you are trying to optimise your up and coming cartoon for the disney channel, a time when mistakes arent an option.
The tool can be used quickly by applying global compression to the whole movie or you can spend more time compressing specific symbols in your movie with the advanced features of the tool. For the people who will use only the basic functionality of Optimaze, the results are perfectly acceptable and the interface you will be using is quite simple to grasp a simple slider bar applies compression to the whole movie ranging from 1% compression to 100% compression, a simple drag of the mouse and the filesize of your movie is dramatically reduced without any loss in quality. At the click of a button you can compare the compressed movie with its original predecessor, this button is a toggle button, so clicking it again will show the compressed movie once more and so on and so forth. All the applied compression can be viewed immediatley upon completion in realtime after a slight wait(nothing too major) and a status bar notifies you of the progress while you wait. You have the usual video controls again, for the whole movie which make it easy for you to see the state of each individual frame or watch the new compressed movie as a whole.
Without revealing everything in the program(i want to leave you some little gizmos to uncover) i would like to mention one more aspect of the program, which to be honest seems to have been rushed in at the end of the development cycle as an added extra to increase sales, it is possible for you to apply visual effects to the whole compressed movie, these effects appear to be a bi-product of the results produced by particular compression settings. I really dont like the fact that they have tried to package basic, swish like effects in this program, not to slag off swish, because it has its purpose, but i think Optimaze would be best left as simply a compression tool. The effects are not particularly appealing, although im not a designer by trade, i know when something looks good, and i am yet to see anything nice as a result of these effects and i doubt i will. Flickering lines, star likes shapes of varying sizes and out of proportion shapes, lingering from an animation arent visually appealing. Maybe they have their use, but not in the masses. Working out how to choose and apply the effects to the movie deserves a medal in itself, i had to read the whole of the PDF based manual to find out how to apply the different effects. It seems that it is only possible to access the effect settings from a keyboard shortcut and their is no option in the file menu which would be the first place most people will look. Im sure one more option in the file menu wouldnt have caused any major issues. After pressing the keyboard shortcut to access the effects panel, a grey looking windows api style panel opens up above the application with a dropdown list of different effects to choose from and a few options for each effect, once you have clicked the close button you then have to select an option from the file menu(strangley enough) to apply the effects to the movie and view the new movie, why this is so long winded for what its worth i dont know.
One last thing, before i summarise, on top of all this compression and reduction of filesize, you can also export the final compressed movie with the standard flash mx compression employed for use in the flash 6 player, gzlib compression, which is somewhat better at compressing the textual data in your flash movies, the actionscript and text mainly. The compression that Optimaze employs is for the graphical aspects of your flash movies, and it achieves this in simple terms by optimizing vector curves and removing unnecessary vectors.
So in summary, the program is a must have tool for anybody who works in an environment were filesize on the web is an issue, which happens to be the great majority of us, Broadband still isnt the standard but even if it was, a few seconds less of download time isnt going to hurt anybody is it? The tool is easy to use(you can have a smaller .swf file in seconds)yet it has advanced functionality for the people who want to spend a little more time refining their compression, it looks rather pretty but maybe a tad amateuristic. I can see the benefits of creating this application with Flash but i can also see the benefits of creating this application with Delphi, Visual Basic or C. Get your employer to fork out the small fee for this application and make the usage of the program a standard part of your development cycle. How can your employer winge at smaller files? they cant really. On a side note lets hope that Macromedia buy Optimaze and include the funcionality of this tool in the next release of Macromedia Flash, wink, wink, nudge, nudge;)