This
is a fairly large (500kb) promotional movie that includes Flash
video. It probably doesn't need the motion clip to be quite as long.
However, Flash does allow for the clip to be duplicated inside the
player so by using it four times I have saved on bandwidth.
Flash can merge images into
each other and give an illusion of gradual movement. This sunset
is made from 3 images so is only 35kb.
Flash
Banners
The
header here has two Flash animations. They both include gifs (jpegs
won't allow transparency) and are both less than 25kb. They load
text or vectors first to allow the images to load smoothly.
On
my English educational site there is another banner, which is very
small (about 7kb) as it is fills and vectors.