The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group
Macromedia Director 7
Shockwave Internet Studio
Bernadette Houghton
 bernieh@iaccess.com.au

Macromedia's Director 7 Shockwave Internet Studio is a high-powered authoring tool with which you can create complex, multi-layered multimedia movies. Think games, presentations, simulations, Web sites and interactive CD-ROMs. Aimed at professional multimedia developers, Director is a sophisticated, yet intuitive, development tool. To give you some idea of its power ... it will animate up to 1000 objects simultaneously, and play out the action at up to 999 frames per second.

Back in PC Update, June 1999, 1 found myself impressed with Macromedia Flash, Director's little sibling. Flash and Director include a common subset of functions, although they're implemented differently. And whereas Flash's strength is vector drawings and short animations, Director's speciality is full-blown, sophisticated multimedia. Director lacks Flash's powerful vector drawing capability, but ships with Fireworks so you can still create sophisticated bitmap graphics if Director's built-in drawing functions aren't up to the job.

Much of Director's power emanates from the inclusion of the Lingo scripting language, giving you the ability to add extensive interactive capabilities. Also shipped with Director is Sonic Foundry SoundForge XP for Windows for creating and editing audio files, and Aftershock for controlling Director output in Web browsers. As with most major development tools, Director has an established market of third-party plug-in extensions with which you can bolster its functionality; you'll find a selection of `life' plug-ins included in the package.

Version 7 of Director includes a new, faster, engine although the interface is similar to that of previous releases. A library of 100 pre-built behaviours which you can drag and drop onto objects or frames speeds up development time considerably. There are several features designed specifically to optimise transmission of movies and reduce viewer waiting time. Streaming, for instance, means that Director movies can begin playing once the content required for the first frame has downloaded. Additionally, you can set movies to loop through the first few frames until the rest of the content has downloaded.

How It Works

Director has three main working windows -

  • the Cast, which contains all the media (cast members) that make up a Director movie - the background, graphics, sounds, special effects and so on.
  • the Stage, where you assemble the movie.
  • the Score, a frame-by-frame overview of your movie
T he first step in creating a movie is to set the size of your Stage, then add cast members to the Cast. You can create these within Director or import them from another program or Cast. Creating cast members within Director involves opening the appropriate window and using the tools provided. For instance, open the Text window to create text, the Paint window to draw bitmaps, the Vector Shape window to create vector drawings and so on.


Figure 1. Creating a Director movie. The dotted line next to the balloons is the tweening path


Figure 2. Expanded view of the Score. Note the special effect channels


Figure 3. Assigning button behaviour to a sprite


Figure 4. Creating graphics in the Paint window

Once you have your cast members, you drag them from the Cast onto either the Stage or the Score to create sprites, then position and resize them as your creativity dictates. Each visible sprite has its own channel in the Score, and you control its appearance and behaviour by manipulating the channel, tweaking the properties at the top of the Score, and adding behaviours. Behaviours are what give your movie interactivity and intelligence; for instance, changing the look of a button according to the user's mouse position, starting or stopping an animation under specific conditions, or opening a new URL when the user clicks a sprite. You can drag pre-built behaviours from the Library Palette, use Lingo to create your own, or purchase them from third-party developers. When you drag a behaviour nto a sprite, a dialog box may appear prompting you for any information needed to control the behaviour.

Among Director's pre-built behaviours are simple animations such as Sway, Fade and Rotate. If you need more than this, you can animate objects using a traditional frame-by-frame method or by tweening. With tweening, you set up the starting and ending points for the animation, and Director automatically adds the frames in between. Each sprite capable of being tweened displays a tweening handle when selected; after you've placed the sprite in its starting position on the Stage, you simply drag the tweening handle to where you want the sprite to finish up. Holding down the ALT key and clicking the resulting path adds curve points which you can push and pull to shape the path you want the sprite to follow. To skew or rotate sprites as they move along the path, you can adjust the appropriate options at the top of the Score. Since you can play your movies back immediately, it's very easy to tweak and make subtle changes to an animation.

Once you've created your movie, you can save it as a Shockwave movie or Java applet, then use Aftershock to create an HTML document to display the movie in a browser. At this point, you can open your movie in an HTML authoring tool and design the rest of the page, or embed the Aftershock code in an existing Web page. Alternatively, save your movie as a stand-alone executable application or protected movie.


Figure 5. Applying special effects (third party plug-in) to a sprite


Figure 6. Creating graphics with Fireworks


Figure 7. Editing audio files with Sound Forge XP for Windows


Figure 8. Creating HTML documents in Aftershock

Assessment

I found Director so intuitive that once I had completed the tutorial (which, by the way, is excellent), I was able to create my own movie, adding sound effects, links, animation and action buttons with a minimum of fuss and only occasional recourse to the documentation. For such a powerful and sophisticated program, this was very refreshing. Director has many more features than I've mentioned here, but the great thing is that the features I weren't using didn't get in my way.

Director's main strengths are its ease of use, streaming support, small resulting file sizes and its ability to embed all the media required by a movie into a single file. It also supports all the standard Internet protocols - HTML, HTTP, HTTPS, CGI Post and XML. The documentation is good, with both hard copy and online user manuals, including a hefty Lingo Dictionary. There is also a good online animated Guided Tour but, regrettably, only one sample file.

I didn't encounter any major problems; the peskiest issue was Director permitting me to attach illegal behaviours to sprites which I then had to go back and de-attach. Annoying, but not earth-shattering.

Overall, I found myself very impressed with Director's capabilities and ease of use.

Cost and Availability

RRP $1895. Available from your local software reseller, otherwise contact Macromedia ph: (03) 9853 0900, fax (03) 9853 0600,
e-mail asiapacific@Macromedia.com. 
Download a trial version from www.macromedia.com/software/director/

Minimum System Requirements

Pentium 100 processor, Windows 95 or Windows NT 4.0, MB RAM for each application running concurrently CD-ROM drive, sound card, 800 x 600 resolution and 8-bit, 256 colour monitor, 65 MB free disk space for Director component.

Reprinted from the April 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia