Working with SWF files.

[davidblaine]

Hi, I'm helping our local museum update their website. They had some very lame swf files, still pics of lifeless buildings made into silent slideshows. They had tons of pictures of these same buildings with people in the pics, smiling visitors, costumed guides, great pics. So I'm making new swf files using a program called VideoPad. It works OK, not super. But my problem is that the swf files used to be about 1 meg or lower, and now they run 3 to 6 megs each.

I have scaled all images to the bare minimum size necessary and compressed them down to image sizes of 20 to 50 KB. (I used Gimp for that.) I degraded the encoding bitrate on VideoPad to the lowest that will make a viewable slideshow. I've limited the number of pictures to five or six, some as low as three, and kept the dwell time on each image to 3 seconds, long enough to fade in, view and fade out.

VideoPad doesn't seem to have any compression tools for the actual swf file. I don't have money to buy a big name program, but who can tell me what does a better job, or what I'm doing wrong?

Thanks for any suggestions. Ask additional questions if necessary, please!