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Want to use Smacker like the pros? We all want to create the best possible videos, and these ideas are a great start.
Here you go - previously-unpublished Smacker tips and tricks that come straight from the pros. Game developers across the globe use these techniques every day, and our own Smacker developers have added a few tips of their own!
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. Finally, there is even a third section of miscellaneous tips for you to check out!
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If your video is suffering from color reduction problems, try one or more of the following tricks:
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If your application is high-color, then be sure to make high-color Smacker files by using frequent palette changes. Start out by using new palettes every ten frames or so (in the palette settings section, use the "Calculate a new optimized palette for every how many frames" option). This is the best option if your game is played at 16-bit or 24-bit color depth - with a palette every ten frames, your videos should look wonderful!
If your game is 256-color, then try palette rotation - palette rotation means that each frame uses fewer colors, but on each palette change, Smacker will use the opposite end of the palette. For example, on frames 1 to 10, Smacker might use colors 0 to 127, on frames 11 to 20, Smacker would then use colors 128 to 255. This trick lets you use multiple palettes even in 8-bit mode without palette flashes. You can compensate for the fewer colors by increasing the palette frequency - say, every 5 frames instead of every 10 frames.
Try DeBabelizer from Equilibrium - Smacker usually does a better job on the color reduction, but DeBabelizer has tons of dithering options. Depending on the video, the dithering technique used can be more crucial than the color reduction.
Use higher resolution - try using 640x480 instead of 320x240 - the color reduction will be the same, but the smaller pixels will hide a lot of loss.
Try with and without halftoning - some videos look better without halftoning, which is the default.
If you are playing your movies in standard windowed mode under Windows, then make sure to include the Windows 20 reserved colors in your videos, or Smacker will have to remap your video at run-time (and runtime remapping doesn't look as good as compression-time remapping).
If you are playing your Smacker files in 16-bit mode, then you may being seeing a different kind of color reduction problem - the reduction of palletized RGB 8:8:8 data down to the 16-bit 5:5:5 screen color depth. If you are experiencing the 16-bit problem, then nothing you do in Smacker will help - this is just a limitation of 16-bit video modes (it would be a problem with any codec).
You can determine if your movies are suffering from this problem (which is common with grayscale movies) by playing the Smacker movie in 24-bit mode. If the movie looks good in 24-bit mode, then you are simply being limited by the 16-bit video mode (rather than anything that Smacker is doing).
As you try these tips, use the Convert a File option with flic output, instead of Smacking - creating a flic is much faster than compressing a Smacker file over and over.
Try to convert a sub-section of the movie, rather than the entire movie, as you experiment with various techniques - this is a big time saver!
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If you've determined that the color reduction is OK, but the movie still doesn't have the quality you need, then Smacker is probably over-compressing your movie. Here are some suggestions for improving Smacker's compression.
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Make sure you are using at least version 4 of Smacker - it can double the quality of your Smacker movies. Smacker can also now use the Bink audio codec which can compress your sound data much, much higher than the Smacker audio codec could. This audio saving can be used to improve video quality even further.
Increase the data rate. This will obviously fix the problem - remember, though, if you try this, adjust both the regular and key frame data rates. Increasing just one of the values may not help at all. Of course, it isn't possible to always increase the data rate, which is why the next suggestion is usually the solution to bandwidth problems...
Increase the data rate during tricky transitions (especially camera pans) using the Expert sub-tab. Borrowing bandwidth from previous and future frames is the key to making incredible Smacker movies - this will almost always completely eliminate common problem areas like camera pans and zooms. The basic idea is to steal a little of the bandwidth before and after the transition and let Smacker use it to improve the difficult frames.
For example, say we have a 300 kps movie, and we have a fast camera pan in frames 15 to 30. By borrowing 50% of the data rate for frames 1 to 14 and frames 31 to 45, we can double the bandwidth available for the transition frames 15 to 30. To tell Smacker to perform this bandwidth allocation, you just enter the following the lines into the Expert tab:
1 14 150000
15 30 600000
31 45 150000
This technique is what made the movies in some games look so good - the bandwidth is used where it is needed most. For example, the Jedi Knight Smacker movies are 640x360 and look perfect, yet they only use a 2x CD-ROM data rate! Future versions of Smacker will attempt to do this intelligent bandwidth re-allocation automatically (Bink already does), but you will always be able to hand-tweak a movie to make it look even better.
Try turning off halftoning. Halftoning is usually necessary to make gradients look nice, but if your video doesn't have any gradients, then you can turn off half-toning and increase compression quality.
Filter your videos with Movie Cleaner or RAD Video Tools before Smacking them. Noise filters make an incredible difference - a little smoothing, contrast increate, and a bit of black clamp makes a huge difference. I've increased the quality of some Smackers dramatically, just by filtering. All codecs are helped by filtering, but it particularly helps Smacker, because noise patterns tend to amplify during color reduction.
Try scaling compression. When using scaling compression, Smacker only compresses every other scanline (which effectively doubles the data rate used to encode the remaining scanlines). Smacker can even playback back height compressed Smackers in either interlaced style (a black scanline for every other scan line) or doubled mode (each scanline is doubled). Interlaced 640x480 movies are actually my favorite resolution in Smacker - almost all movies look wonderful at a 2x to 4x data rate. Note that if you use interlacing, you may want to increase the brightness of the source data to account for the slight darkening that interlacing causes.
Use fewer colors if your movie doesn't need them. This is a non-obvious way to increase the quality of your Smackers. For example, dropping to 128 colors from 256 colors frees up about 30% more bandwidth that Smacker will use to increase the overall compression quality. This does, of course, depend on the video, though - sometimes using fewer colors hurts the color reduction stage more than it helps the compression stage.
Only use keyframes on scene transitions. Key frames are obviously tougher to compress because so much more data must be encoded. For best results, don't use key frames at all (even auto-key frames - set the percentage to 100%). If you need some key frames for navigation purposes, use the Expert sub-tab to set specific key frames only on the scene changes.
Borrow bandwidth from the audio tracks by compressing them higher, or storing them in a smaller format. Audio can use a significant portion of your bandwidth budget (especially 16-bit stereo tracks). Consider giving the video more bandwidth by the compressing the audio more or downgrading the quality of the audio (say to 22 Khz from 44 Khz, for example).
Use less frequent palette changes. Palette changes use more bandwidth, so don't use super-frequent palette changes unless you've already determined that you need them.
Use higher resolution - try using 640x480 instead of 320x240 - the compression will be lossier, but the smaller pixels will hide a lot of compression error.
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Miscellaneous Smacker Tips |
Height compression can be switched between interlaced or doubled mode at playback time - this lets the user choose the style of movie they like the most. Some games even use height-compression with linear interpolation in 16-bit color modes for really clean stretching.
The smoothed mode is really nice in 16-bit mode. You can view this without the SDK by: 1) making sure DirectDraw is installed, 2) switch to 16-bit color depth, 3) select 2x width and height stretching in the Player tab, and then 4) choose the "Smoothed Pixels" option for the "On 2x stretch" combo-box.
Try mixing multiple sound tracks into one Smacker file. At playback time, Smacker can select between one or more tracks to play. If data rate isn't an issue, this is a convenient way to encode multiple languages without filling up your CD with tons of video files.
You can play the exact same Smacker file on the PC or Mac - you don't even have to change the file types for the Mac. Try downloading the Mac player - you can play any Smacker file on a PC CD-ROM just by choosing it.
Try using the graphics processor as a quick converter. It can operate in 256 or true color modes, and can convert between almost any type of files - AVIs, QuickTimes, FLCs, BMPs, TGAs, GIFs, etc, etc.
Try some of the palette tricks (especially the palette rotation feature) described in the color reduction tips above - it's pretty amazing how good you can get some videos to look - even with much fewer than 256 colors.
Smacker includes some really scalable run-time blitting modes (on both the PC and the Mac) - 1x (of course), 2x, 2x interlaced, or 2x smoothed (bi-linearly interpolated). This lets a developer create a single 320x240 movie that can be played at the following resolutions (depending on how fast the machine is):
320x240 1x - Slow Pentium
640x480 2x interlaced - Mid-range Pentium (133 to 166 Mhz)
640x480 2x - Mid-range Pentium and up (166 to 200 Mhz)
640x480 2x smoothed - High-end Pentium and up
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