Macromedia's Director 6.5 Multimedia Studio

Emedia Professional, Oct, 1998 by Stephen Ellerin

Attention budding Hitchcocks and Spielbergs! Grab your beret and megaphone and plant yourself in the canvas chair with your name on the back ... you, too, can make movies.

Macromedia's Director 6.5 Multimedia Studio packs all the movie-making tools you'll need into one box. Like its predecessors, Director 6.5 lets you import, integrate, and synchronize text, graphics, animation, digital video, and sound--in most standard multimedia formats--and then blend these raw materials into an interactive, computer-based "movie." You can create simple animations, complete demonstrations, kiosk presentations, tutorials, applications, and even Web games that will play on most major platforms, including Windows 95, 3.1, and NT, as well as on the Macintosh and the Web. And in version 6.5, you can do almost all of it without writing a single line of Lingo script.

LIGHTS, CAMERA, ACTION!

Director creatively adopts familiar movie terms to define the process of making a Director-based movie. To begin, import "cast" members such as graphics, sound files, or text to create your movie's "internal cast." The same cast members can appear repeatedly "onstage" without incurring additional memory overhead.

Next, organize your cast to group together cast members that will appear onstage together. Organizing cast members in this manner not only speeds playback, but helps you compose, or "storyboard," your movie.

Copies of any cast member you drag either onto the "stage" or into the "score" subsequently become "sprites." You can place any number of sprites onstage at any time, in any one of 120 "channels." You can modify the appearance (such as color or size) or "behavior" of these sprites at any time without affecting the characteristics of their original cast members.

For more complex animation, set a sprite's starting and ending locations, and then add intermittent "key frames" to establish the points along its path at which it will change its appearance, direction, or speed. At any key frame, you can drag your sprite to its new position or redefine its condition; Director will automatically generate the necessary "in between frames" (called "tweens" in traditional animation).

The flow of action is controlled in Director's "score," which displays a string of individual "frames" like the frames in traditional cell animation. Director's playback head moves from the first frame to the last, "playing" each frame as it goes. You can play each frame in sequence, jump to any frame out of sequence, loop any sequence of frames, or hold on any frame.

You make sprites perform by applying behaviors. A behavior is like a script that dictates how a particular sprite behaves in any particular frame or sequence of frames. You can either apply a behavior to a cast member itself--so that the cast member exhibits that behavior every time it appears (such as specifying Madonna's hair color as blonde)--or apply a behavior to one particular sprite of a cast member, in which case that behavior applies only to the frame(s) in which that sprite appears (such as specifying Madonna's wardrobe in a particular sequence). Every behavior has an "event," which triggers that behavior (such as when the user clicks a button or when the playback head reaches a particular frame) and an "action," which is the script that Director runs in response to the triggering event.

You can also apply a behavior--such as a "go to" statement--to any frame or series of frames. Once attached to the frame, the behavior will execute whenever the playback head reaches that frame. Director also provides two sound channels for separate or simultaneous playback (such as music playing in the background with a voiceover).

ANCIENT TONGUES

In earlier versions, behaviors were handscripted using Lingo, Director's own scripting language. In version 6.5, most behaviors now require a simple click-and-drag from Director's Behaviors Library, located in the Xtras folder, to the cast. Drag several behaviors into a single sprite to build more complex actions. Veteran users can still create their own behaviors with Lingo or the Behavior Inspector, and novices can build scripts from new roll-out menus.

Director helps you automatically generate screen buttons, complete with mouse up, mouse down, and mouse over states. Dragging over a library script lets you set the action for your button.

Particularly useful--and potentially problematic--is the "projector" feature. Once your movie is complete, you can create a projector (a tamper-proof, royalty-free run-time version) for either Macintosh or Windows platforms. However, to create a projector on an opposing platform, you must have the version of Director for that platform. Unfortunately, Macromedia does not bundle them together or offer a discount on the second version.

FEATURES FONDA THAN FAIRBANKS

Director 6.5 Multimedia Studio, like all great theatrical families, arrives with a full panoply of multimedia talent. Among its treasure trove of features: Shockwave, which compresses Director movies to allow streaming from the Web; Shockwave audio (.SWA), which compresses sound files and enables them to stream either over the Web or from a CD; and xRes 3, a high-end graphics program for creating, editing, and combining large graphic objects in your movies.