Tips from Terry Schussler Seminar

Date:    Fri, 11 Nov 1994 10:53:01 +1000
From:    tom.mcginness@DIT.CSIRO.AU
Subject: Terry Schussler seminar

Just thought I'd post a few word of wisdom from the father of Schusslerisation. He gave a seminar here in Sydney three days ago and some of what he said was of relevance to things discussed here in recent times - mostly cross platform issues. Yes Schusslerisation was mentioned but I will comment on it no further - it is purely a personal decision whether you think it will help your project. But to be fair I must point out that many of Terry's ideas are about getting small performance improvements in your projects. Add up a few small gains and you get...

QuickTime

The most important thing I learned was that if you are developing programs using QT for cross platform playback, use QT 1.6.1 for your final compression on the MAC. This is because QT2 for Windows isn't available yet and Windows has trouble with MAC QT2 movies. The other good suggestion was to set the audio interleave really low for Windows playback - 0.25 sec. You can't get that low in Premiere for the Mac but you can in the Windows version and in MovieShop.

Also put Qt movies in the same folders as the director movies that call them. Try not to put them lower in the hierarchy and never put them higher or sideways. Playback performance is related to how much work director has to do to find them (I am not sure about this one - remember I'm quoting)

Also make sure DirectToStage is on for Windows playback.

Audio

Some Windows sound cards have trouble with the mac default rate of 22254.54k. So if you can, sample at the windows default rate of 22050k. This causes no problems with Mac playback.

Also if you want more than one sound to play at the same time in Windows they must be sampled at exactly the same rate because Director has to mix them down to one channel to play.

Text

Convert text to bitmaps wherever possible to avoid font problems and if your text only uses a single colour, transform it to 1-bit. You can resore its colour by highlighting it on the stage and using the color palette in the tools window to reselect its original colour. (one problem I've found is that if your original text colour is light, converting to 1 bit makes it white on white so make sure your text bitmaps are dark or black before transforming)

Palettes

Fade to black or white doesn't work properly in Windows because white (1) and black (256) pixels stay locked. To get around it create a custom palette with two whites at 1 and 2 and two blacks at 255 and 256 then remap all your whites to 2 and blacks to 255.

Windows Projectors

There is a *.INI file which can be used to set some useful parameters for windows playback. Copy the DIRECTOR.INI file and rename it PROJECTOR.INI (or whatever your projector is called). Some useful ones:

In general with these settings use the lowest number you can get away with.

Also if you get distortion at maximum volume in Windows you can reduce the soundLevel7 setting in this file slightly.

the preloadeventabort

A property I hadn't used. It's default if FALSE but if you set it to TRUE clicking the mouse or touching the keyboard aborts preloads - good for improving interaction times!

These are the main things that impressed me. He had a lot more to say about efficient lingo, lists, etc etc but I haven't time to fit it all here. After hearing Terry, I would definitley recommend getting the Grey Matter Mediabook for Director CD-ROM when it comes out. It might not be as good as being on this list but it looks like it might be the next best thing (and a bit more portable).

Bye now.. 

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Tom McGinness,  Multimedia Producer
CSIRO Information Services
Locked Bag 17, North Ryde 2113
tom.mcginness@dit.csiro.au
Phone: 02 325 3143   Mobile 018 027 047    Fax: 02 325 3200
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