Smacker FAQ

This is a list of frequently asked questions about Smacker. Almost all common questions are handled here, so whenever you are having trouble, come here first!

If you don't find the answers you need here, or in the rest of the help files, or in the Bink FAQs, please e-mail our technical support staff.

Smacker Frequently Asked Questions
Question	Answer
How do I create a Smacker file from an AVI file?	From the main menu of the RAD Video Tools, highlight the AVI file and click the "Smack it!" button. The Smacker Compressor window will open, with the AVI filename and a *.SMK extension as the default output filename. Click on the "Smack" button on the right side of the screen, to create your Smacker file. Both the video and the sound will be converted.
How can I prevent Smacker from skipping frames?	Smacker skips frames whenever it senses that the audio is more than 1/2 a second ahead of the animation. By skipping a frame, Smacker can get the playback back in sync with the audio. When the animation starts falling behind, there are three possible culprits: reading, blitting, or decompressing. The key to solving frame skipping is figuring out which culprit is affecting your animation. The best way to do this is to playback the animation from the "Advanced Play" window with the "Show a playback summary" option checked. The summary window will then display what percentage of the time was spent decompressing, blitting, and reading. If most of the time is in the reading step, then you are most likely just over the data rate for the device that you are playing off. To check this, highlight the Smacker file and click "Analyze". This will show you exactly where you are exceeding the data rate. If you are under the data rate, then you may just have a crummy CD-ROM drive. A good way to check your CD-ROM is to look at the "Device data rate" in the playback summary window to see just how fast it really is. Once you know where the reading problem is (or how bad it is), then you just need to recompress. If most of the time is in the blitting step, then there are a couple of possibilities. First, if you are running under Windows 3.x, then you probably just haven't installed WinG - install it and the blitting should speed way up. Another problem could be poor video drivers (video driver quality is very important if you are running in a high-color mode). Check your vendor's web site for new drivers - it may solve the problem for you. If the majority of the time is in the decompression step, then the movie is probably just too difficult to play on the CPU that you are testing. You can make the movie easier to playback by increasing the compression ratio.
How can I make my Smacker files smaller?	The obvious way to shrink your Smacker files is to simply increase the compression ratio (set your data rate from 240K to 120K, for example). However, there are several other ways to make your Smacker files smaller that are a bit more obscure: Tell Smacker to use fewer colors. Smacker has an incredible color reducer - the difference between 256 colors and 96 colors is just not noticeable. Using the color reducer creates smaller Smacker files because fewer colors means less data for Smacker to compress. Use either interlacing or double height compression. This will halve the size of your animation because Smacker will only have to compress half the data. Use a lower sound data-rate. 16-bit, 22 Khz, stereo sound uses 88 kps, so just by switching to 8-bit, 11 Khz, mono, you can save 77 kps. Make sure you are using Bink audio for your sound compression - it will generate much smaller data. Increase the sound compression level. Smacker can compress your sound data greatly at the cost of some quality. You should be able to get away with a lossy of "1" on 8-bit data and "4" on 16-bit data. Turn off halftoning for your animations. By default, Smacker will halftone high-color input data. If your animations aren't too long, you can turn off halftoning and create smaller Smacker files. Set the key frame control to "at 100% changed". By default, if a frame changes by more than 90%, Smacker promotes it to a key frame. By changing this setting to 100%, no frames will ever be promoted. Note that if you are compressing to a target data-rate and you use one of these techniques, then Smacker will use the extra bandwidth to improve its quality (so the file might not get smaller, but the frame's quality could go up).
How can I optimize the quality of my Smacker files?	If you're working on video quality, the first thing to do is to determine whether you've got a color reduction issue or a compression issue. A color reduction problem means that your quality is being lost when Smacker reduces your 24-bit or 16-bit graphics files into 8-bit Smacker frames. A compression problem means that the Smacker compression process is removing too much quality. So, the first step in improving your videos is to determine which problem you are having. The way to determine this is to convert the movie first into a flic (click on the "Convert a File" button on the main screen), rather than directly into a Smacker file. If the flic looks bad, then you're looking at a color reduction issue. If the flic looks good and the Smacker file doesn't, then you've got a compression issue. Once you've determined which problem it is, see the color reduction tips section for color reduction problems, and the compression tips section for compression troubles. There is a third section of tips for you to check out at even more Smacker tricks!
How do I create high-color Smacker files?	The best way to create high color files is to use Bink Video, our true-color, 24-bit compressor. You can, however, use Smacker to create high-color animations. To create high-color Smackers, enter 10 for the "Calculate a new optimized palette for every how many frames:" prompt. High-color Smacker animations will flicker on 8-bit devices, but look terrific on high-color devices.
Video looks great everywhere, except for a few specific frames - What should I do?	This is a common problem - video isn't always consistent. Good compression settings for the majority of the video could be devastating to a few specific frames. Fortunately, Smacker allows you to control the compression settings right down to a frame by frame basis. So, if frame 450 didn't look very good, then use the "Hint" box in the Smacker Compressor to decrease the compression on that single frame. You get the best of both worlds - good compression on the video as a whole, and good quality on the few frames that show too much loss. See the "How do I set compression settings for a specific frame?" question for more details.
How do I set a specific frame to be a key frame?	To tell Smacker to make a specific frame a key frame, use the Hint box in the Smacker Compressor screen. Click in the text box, and enter the frame number twice, then one star, and finally a one. For example, to make frame 87 a key frame, enter "87 87 * * 1" in the text box.
How do I remap a graphics file to another file's palette?	From the main screen of the RAD Video Tools, highlight the file that you want to remap. Click the "Convert a file" button to open the the RAD Converter. Check the "Output as 256 Colors" option (it is the default). In the "Use palette from" section, select "File", and enter the palette filename into the text box. Hit the Convert button on the right of the screen, when you're ready to begin the conversion.
How can I convert 256-color files to Windows 236-color files?	From the main screen of the RAD Video Tools, highlight the animation that you want to convert, and click the "Convert a file" button at the bottom of the window. Once the RAD File Converter window opens, select the "Output as 256 colors" option (it is the default). Choose "Always" for the "Win system colors" option, then click the "Convert" button to the right of the screen. Once it is converted, you'll be able to use the video in Windows with no remapping. You can also tell Smacker not to use the first ten and last ten colors at all, by using the "Palette entries" settings. Set the "To Use" option to 236, and the "Start at" option to 10.
Video is great, except for some parts in a few important frames - Is there anything I can do?	When the entire video is fine, but there are some objects in the video that are too blurry, an unusual feature of Smacker can help you - the ability to compress your videos into another flic file for touch-up. For example, say that you're writing an adventure game, and you've put an important object in the video that the user needs to solve the game. If you compress the video too much, the user might not see the object clearly, but if you compress the video too little, frames start skipping. Here's what you need to do to fix this kind of problem: Compress your videos into another flic file. Then open the new flic file and touch-up the parts of the video that need improvement. Then all you have to do is recompress the touched-up video in lossless mode, so that your changes are kept during the recompression. This is, however, a pretty time-consuming task, so you'd only want to do it in specific circumstances, but when you need it - you need it! See the "How do I touch up Smacker's compression?" question for details on the touch-up procedures.
How do I compress QuickTime files?	To compress your QuickTime files, you need to download QuickTime from Apple's web site. Once QuickTime is installed, Smacker can directly read the files for compression.
How do I touch up Smacker's compression?	Compress the animation with the Smacker Processor in the RAD Video Tools, but click on the "Type" button and change the output type to a flic file. This will create a new animation file that has been lossy-compressed. Optionally, you can set the "Mix in original data" menu option to include the original frame data before each compressed frame. Load Animator Pro, Animator Studio or Premiere and touch-up the animation file. If you previously checked the "Mix in original data" menu option, every other frame will have the original data for easy cut and paste operations. Now recompress the touched-up animation with the Smacker Processor in the RAD Video Tools. If you used the "mixed with original" option, be sure to check the "Skip every other" option. Finally, set the normal and key frames to be compressed "losslessly", and click the Smack button.
How do I compress several files at night?	Just use the Batch button in the Smacker compression window. This will queue up a list of compressions that you can start later.
How do I set compression settings for a specific frame?	To tell Smacker to use compression settings for a particular frame, use the Hint Window. Click in the text box, and enter the frame number twice (or frame range), then the compression level, and finally one star. For example, to compress frame 250 at 400 kps, enter "250 250 400000 *" in the Hint window. The Hint Window overrides the Compression Settings that you choose for the file, giving you the ability to customize compression for specific frames in your video.
Smacker skips a few frames in the same place of the video every time - How can I clean it up?	If Smacker always skips the same frames every time, then you could have a bad CD-R disc. Test the playback of the video on another CD-R and see if the problem disappears. Otherwise, the problem frames could just be larger or more difficult frames to decompress. In this case, you can either turn up the compression settings for the specific problem frames (see also How do I set compression settings for a specific frame?), or you can place a key frame on a frame number after the problem frames. Then, even if Smacker skips a frame, the video will be restored by the key frame.
Smacker skips frames constantly. What should I do?	If Smacker skips a few frames, I usually don't worry about it. Smacker will have to skip frames occasionally (if the CD-ROM has a scratch, or if the user starts something in the background), so the occasional dropped frame shouldn't be anything to worry about. There are times, however, when Smacker can skip frames nearly constantly. It means that the Smacker video is out of tolerance - it just won't play back fast enough at the current compression settings. When this happens, you can try setting key frames every second or so to occasionally refresh the video. If key frames don't help, then you'll have to increase the compression ratios so that Smacker can retrieve and decompress the frames faster.