Fine Tuning the Hard Drive

Date:    Thu, 29 Sep 1994 13:54:14 +1000
From:    mcginnes@SYD.DIT.CSIRO.AU
Subject: Re: How to fine-tune Director movies

>I am looking for a book or other printed material on fine-tuning large
>Macromedia Director 4.0 projects for playing back from a cdrom. My main
>interest is in fine-tuning them for playing back from an HFS disk on a
>macintosh platform with limited memory. Advice on: loading speed/size/bit
>depth/compression of pictures and QuickTime movies, palette switching, and
>loading and purging resources from memory are welcome. Thanks.
>
Others will have lots of suggestions on how to fine tune within Director. The following is a method for optimizing the source disk from which you cut the CD master. Optimizing the file placement on the disk makes a BIG difference in the performance of the resulting CD-ROM. This is for MAC HFS disks only. I would welcome a similar process for ISO-9660
  1. You need a dedicated drive to contain the CD-ROM image and nothing else.
  2. Restart your mac with all extensions off (hold down SHIFT) and Appletalk inactive
  3. Format your target drive
  4. Copy any file of about 1MB size to the drive (name it JUNK or whatever)
  5. Now copy your application files to the disk in the order of how frequently they will be needed. I usually copy the main Projector, then Shared Cast, then other movies. It's up to you where you place video, sounds and other external resources. Lastly copy things like readmes, teachtext, quicktime etc.
  6. When all files are copied, launch ResEdit and use the Get File/Folder Info menu option to rename the desktop files and make them visible. So rename:

    and uncheck the INVISIBLE box. Then save and quit.

  7. Drag the JUNK file you transferred in 3 to the trash and empty the trash.
  8. Unmount then remount your target drive - drag it to the trash and use SCSI probe or just restart your mac (extensions still OFF)
  9. The desktop will be rebuilt and the new desktop files placed at the head of the disk.
  10. Trash the OLD desktop files.

There you are: a fully optimised disk ready to burn from. All you need now is some content. 

Tom McGinness,  Multimedia Producer
CSIRO Information Services
c/- CSIRO Division of Information Technology
Building E6B Macquarie University 2109
Locked Bag 17, North Ryde NSW 2113
email: tom.mcginness@dit.csiro.au