 The magazine of the Melbourne PC User Group Macromedia Director Shockwave Studio Version 8.0 Mike Rule |
Back in 1993, I landed a consulting job to help a University with the design
and development of its first commercial instructional multimedia project. Two surprises awaited me on site.
Firstly, it was an Apple shop and I had to learn to drive a Macintosh and secondly, they were developing the
course using a program called Director.
A few weeks later I had gained a lot of respect for the multimedia capabilities of the Mac and I was in love
with Director. Since that time I have developed at least two or three commercial multimedia projects each
year in Director and my affection for the product has not lessened. This love affair deepened with version 4
and the first native Windows implementation.
Director is, of course, a multimedia authoring system. It enables the author to assemble media elements
including digital video, digital audio, graphics and text into a program which can be compiled into either an
executable projector or a shockwave movie which can be delivered over the web. In my case, I use it to
develop computer based training courses, instructional multimedia, promotional material and other
presentations.
For as long as I have known it, Director has used a film metaphor. The final product is a movie which is
played on the stage (Figure 1) . The various components used to build the movie are actors which are
assembled in the cast. When, where and how the actors appear on the stage is controlled by the score. It all
sounds a bit twee but it actually works very well in practice.
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When an actor is placed in the score it becomes a sprite. The
score (Figure 2) is organised into a grid which consists of frames vertically and channels horizontally. The
frames show what is happening on the stage at a particular point in time. The playback head moves
horizontally across the score when a movie is played and the actors in each frame are displayed on the stage
when the playback head is in that frame.
The rate at which the playback head moves through the score is called the tempo and is measured in frames per
second. You can set tempos at up to 999 frames per second and, if you have access to a Cray Supercomputer,
you may achieve a tempo approaching that limit. Meanwhile 30 to 60 frames per second is a more practical
tempo for the normal PC.
One of the main strengths of Director is that it can be used at two levels. It contains a powerful scripting
language called Lingo but, as Bernadette Houghton found in her review of Director 7 (PC Update, April
2000), it is possible to build quite complex and sophisticated movies without any programming at all.
It was not always this easy but Macromedia implemented two very sensible decisions in versions 5 and 6
respectively. Firstly they opened up the architecture of the program so that third-party developers could
create plug-in programs called Xtras which increase the functionality of the product. Secondly, they extended
Lingo and changed it from a straight linear language to a more object-oriented programming (OOP) model. This
in turn enabled programmers to build self-contained code modules called behaviours.
Xtras give you the sexy stuff but it was behaviours that dramatically increased the range of things that
developers can do without getting into the nitty-gritty of Lingo programming. It is interactivity that
distinguishes good multimedia and Director now comes with a wide range of pre-packaged behaviours that the
developer can use to incorporate everything from simple `'ait-here-until-the-user-clicks-this-button' actions
to quite sophisticated and complex interactions.
Lockable Sprites
Well, colour me happy. I don't know how many times in the past
I have been doing pre-delivery testing and noticed a slight flicker on the screen which, after much
subsequent searching, turned out to be a background graphic or heading that has been accidentally moved a few
pixels away from where it ought to be for a few frames. Not any more. Once you have located sprites exactly
where you want them on the stage, you can right-click on them, select Lock Sprite and they are there to stay.
Sprites cannot be modified in any way after they have been locked. Locking also prevents behaviours
accidentally being attached to a sprite which can produce some bizarre (and hard-to-find) effects during
testing.
Zoomable Stage and Guides
Placing graphics or other elements at precise locations on the
stage has been another minor annoyance over the years. We all developed techniques such as using ghost ink
temporarily when building up overlay bitmap sequences and using the Sprite Properties dialogue box to
manually locate sprites, but it was a pain.
Director introduced snap-to grids with version 6 but they were fairly clunky when compared to an application
like Photoshop with its ability to zoom in on an area of the screen and place guides to easily and accurately
position screen elements.
Macromedia have finally given us guides and the ability to zoom in on the stage. While not in the class of
Photoshop, they are a giant leap forward. The stage can be zoomed from 12% to 800% using either the drop-down
selection box at the bottom left of the stage or by using the new Magnifying Glass tool in the Tools Palette.
The Magnifying Glass is the most useful of these methods. Clicking on the stage zooms into the area under the
tool one step with each successive click. Steps are at 200%, 400° and 800%. Double-clicking on the
Magnifying Glass in the Tools Palette returns the stage to 100%.
The Property Inspector
Another giant leap forward. Everything involved in the construction of a Director movie has properties. For
example, a bitmap has size and position, the ink that has been applied, its foreground and background
colours, its transparency value and a number of other properties.
You could access and modify these properties in previous versions through three or four different dialogue
boxes. Macromedia have brought them all together in version 8 in the Property Inspector and, best of all, it
includes a list view. Everything that you could possibly want to know about an actor is now immediately
available in the Property Inspector.
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Cast Window
Director has always had a cast window where the actors used in a movie are stored but this has been much
improved in version 8 with a list view and the ability to add comments. I use a numerical file naming system
(to dissuade users from playing around too much with asset files) and comments associated with each cast
member will be very useful in managing project assets inside Director. I also like the fact that you can now
sort cast members by name, cast number, attached scripts, type, modification date and comments.
Bitmap Compression
This will please web developers. You can now use JPEG compression on bitmap cast members in a Shockwave
movie. This means smaller file sizes and consequently less time required to download Shockwave files from the
server. Bitmaps can be optimised individually or at the movie level and you can preview the JPEG images at
various compression levels.
Other new features that will be of interest to web developers are the Publish command which lets you create
your Shockwave movie in a HTML template so that you can preview the movie in a browser and Scalable Shockwave
which expands the movie to fit the browser window.
Multiple Curve Vectors
Yeah. I suppose this will be handy but I would have much preferred the ability to import vector shapes from
Photoshop or Illustrator.
Imaging Lingo
I have not had time to fully explore the new imaging commands but I suspect that imaging Lingo will turn out
to be something of a sleeper. Inventive programmers will be able to do some pretty spectacular things with
bitmaps using the new getPixel, setPixel, copyPixel(), image() and extractAlpha() commands.
Sound Lingo
Hurrah. We use narration in nearly all of our projects and sound has never been Director's strong suit. So
much so, in fact, that I have always used a third-party Xtra to manage audio in our projects. Version 8
includes a number of new sound commands that enable you to queue audio assets in RAM and provide a high level
of control over the ways in which those assets are played in the movie. Again, I have only had a preliminary
play with these new commands but I am looking forward to seeing what they can do in a real project.
Summary
There is a lot to like about version 8. The additions and improvements are all practical rather than cosmetic
and, although I have no way of proving it, I have a strong suspicion that it is more stable than previous
versions. Director has always had a predisposition to falling over in a graceless heap at the least
provocation (if you have an idle hour or two, read the Director Quirk List on Gretchen McDowell's http://www.updatestage.com) but, in two weeks of semi-regular use, I was
able to crash it only once.
On the down side, I wonder if Macromedia has not contracted the Microsoft disease or feature bloat. You don't
get nothing for nothing and all of these new features and enhancements must cost something in terms of system
resources. The only evidence for this that I have is that simple transitions such as wipes, covers and pushes
- that were all silky smooth in version 6 - now stutter and jerk across the stage and are far less effective.
Nonetheless, Director still does what it does better than anything else out there. Rumours circulate every
year of a new Director-killer application emerging from the weeds but they come and they go and the old lady
remains serene at the top of the multimedia heap.
| Macromedia Director 8 Shockwave Studio Available from: Firmware Design Ph: 1300 369 951 Scholastic Australia Ph: 1800 665 774 RRP: $2084.50 (Mac and Windows) |
Reprinted from the September 2000 issue of PC Update, the magazine of Melbourne PC User Group, Australia
