Size & Compression Tips

Director & Shockwave compression tips

general quick tips ....

here are some tips to reduce the size of your shockwaves to speed up down-load time

General

Experiment with Afterburner. See how compression effects different media

Find a file's byte size. Due to disk block sizes,a large hard disk reports block size not true size

By-pass html in testing on MacOs 7.5 by using drag and drop of .dcr file

or test the .dcr file directly by using File Open with the option key down

KISS : Keep-it Interactive , Simple and Small

Graphics

Afterburner is very good at compressing graphics but ..

Choose 8 bit colours maximum , 16 colour ideally, never use 16 bit

Choose Indexed colour from Photoshop or Debabelizer menu and change resolution

Keep knocking the image resolution by dithering , until its unacceptable

Use Director Tools to generate any squares ,lines or circles, they only need 58 bytes!

Cut any animated pictures into sections so only the cast change is stored

Try hard to get anything with a few colours into one bit resolution

Any 1 bit graphical cast can be coloured on stage directly from the tools menu

Hold down the apple key and click a sprite for pop-up ink effects to bring variety

Make friends with Cast Info to check cast sizes whilst you trim or use Cast Transform

Cast Info works if you select more than one cast ,it automatically adds the sizes

Enlarge small sprites on stage with Sprite info ,try animating this over time

Sound

Afterburner is not very good at compressing sounds

Keep sounds short and snappy

Avoid using anything other than 11 khz mono 8 bit sounds

For tiny beeps,bangs,and clicks go to 7 khz or even 5 khz (PC sound cards are more fussy here)

Loop any music using the Cast Info box to keep size down , but allow the user to stop it!

Add some percussion noise randomly over sound loops to break them up

Trim the sound to a minimum in a sound editor

Experiment with lingo for fading sound in and out

Tool Draw Shapes

To get down to really small file size < 5k you need to just use Tool shapes at 58 bytes,

Try and use the Tool text for all text . The storage required is negligible .

Some of the smallest shockwaves use the trails effect whilst moving a shape

Trimming off the last few Kilobytes : a low K diet

For a sub 3k shock no text , take fontmap.txt out of the app folder ,restart + resave, new name

In the score window ,select all, make a new movie ,paste in the score (Check all cast is pasted ! )

Check that no graphics have been converted to higher resolutions accidently with CAST INFO

Search for unused cast members with CAST FIND CAST Members

Lingo

Use random jumps to different frames

Avoid non-interactive spinning logos , yuk!

People love the Living Books idea of things being clickable and making random noises

Every button should flash or make a noise ,try a mousedown handler in the Cast script

Cross-Platform Net Issues

Use basic cross-platform fonts in your shockwave e.g. Times, Courier

Be aware that colours can look darker on PCs compared with Macs,

Always try and use relative links in your html pages so you can test on various PCs

Do not overload your processor with effects like dissolve and always test on slower machines

Avoid frames and tables with shockwave at all costs , it slows Netscape down or crashes

TeToToYTM - test early , test often , test on all your target machines

Sources of infomation

Macromedia -extensive,up to date , main company web site

maricopa -user group with tips,tricks and FAQs

Shocklist - my list of quick shockwave sites. All are less than 100k , most < 45k

There is an excellent shockwave produced by Sheri S,called Shocktips ,try and find it at www.macromedia.com

Thanks to Harry Chesley , Alex Z ,Sheri S and John D at Macromedia and Derek Seipp for ideas