About Director
Director, for the uninitiated,
is essentially Flash on steriods. More accurately,
Flash is director's little brother. The
origin of the Shockwave format, Director
is the biggest, baddest interactive media
production and design tool available. Director
is used by interactive designers for CD-ROM
productions and Shockwave content for Web
sites.
Director is truly a "pro
tool." If you are looking to add a
little light Shockwave animation to a Web
site, try Flash. If you are looking to create
a professional CD or Shockwave file to deliver
content - then make the move to Director.
While Flash has limitations due to its vector
file roots, Director allows much more media
to be imported, including Quicktime video
and sound, and instructions to the client
hardware (such as resetting monitor resolution)
can be added. Speaking of resolution, Director
uses a ton of screen real estate in the
authoring environment - I would suggest
a MINIMUM resolution of 1280x1024 for developers
and designers.
I have been using Director
since version 5, and had still been limping
along with version 7 due to the high sticker
price of the software. I have to admit the
interface and overall user experience has
changed pretty dramatically since my introduction
to Director, and I needed to play some serious
catch-up before putting Director through
the wringer.
What's new? Mostly 3D Support.
The biggest new feature is
the ability to import and add interactivity
to 3D models - which can be viewed in the
Shockwave player and rendered either by
3D cards or a software renderer. If only
Apple would finish the drivers to enable
all the features of my GeForce3 card (sigh).
Adding interactivity to 3D models is actually
very easy - there are sets of drag and drop
3D Actions and Triggers for 3D content included
in Director. Simply drag an Action from
the Library window onto your model on the
stage and enter your preferences for said
action in the pop-up dialog. Then, add a
Trigger to either your model or another
sprite or cast member to enable the Action.
The hard part is coming up
with models in the first place. You will
need a 3D program capable of exporting objects
in the .w3D format - there are many packages
that already include this export format,
and more are promised on the Macromedia
Web site (I'm still waiting, DAZ3D and Curious
Labs).
This
example (requires Shockwave 8.5.1) started
with a model supplied on the Director CD with
some quickie Actions to zoom and drag the model.
Triggers have been applied to the fishy for
dragging, rotating, and zooming in and out.
Click and drag on the fish to rotate it in place,
and use the keyboard arrow keys to zoom in and
out. Finally, you can control-click and drag
on the fishy to drag it around the aquarium.
Once a model has been imported
into Director, it is really quite simple
to drag and drop actions onto the cast members
or score using the Library panel. After
you get familiar with the process, it just
takes a couple of moments to add interactivity
to a model. I'm actually quite impressed
with how simple the process has become.
After reading the manual and goofing around
for a whiel - the fishy example was created
in about 30 minutes.
Director has extensive 3D
support, including 3D hardware acceleration,
different shading options, particle systems,
bone animation, and scalable geometry. In
short, it has some serious 3D features for
content delivery and game development -
and alone is probably worth the price of
the upgrade.
Director 8.5 also adds support
for Flash 5 cast members and some great
Lingo for controlling Flash movies. The
ability to control Tell Targeted movie clips
and call to frame actions from Director
is going to make my life a lot easier for
CD production. there is also added Flash
XML support, which I am not even going to
pretend to understand, but a programmer
friend assures me can add several levels
of interactive goodness to a shockwave experience.
What can you do with Director? Whatever
you want.
As I mentioned earlier, Director
is not for the faint of heart. When a program
arrives with 1642 pages of manual, you know
its going to be a beast. Amazingly, not
a lot of those pages are wasted - the manuals
(Using Director Shockwave Studio, What's
New in Director 8.5, and a Lingo Dictionary)
are well written and great references for
most users. To Macromedia's credit - the
software is fairly intuitive and easy to
learn for such a powerful development tool.
I had a student ask me what
can be accomplished using Director for interactive
design. My answer - darn near whatever you
want - the sky is truly the limit. Between
the support for QuickTime video, heavy interactivity,
collision support, XML, Flash, creating
self-contained executables or online Shockwave
content, the real limit to what you can
create with Director is yourself. Make an
online game, a self-promotional CD-ROM,
a Shockwave Web site, or whatever your heart
desires. You'll find that the software can
run with you without needed to take a breath,
and will let you push yourself to your creative
limits.
A VERY basic primer to Director
The Score (or timeline for
you Flash users) has evolved to become more
Flash-like in terms of ease of use, but
still maintains the pro features Director
users demand such as script, sound and tempo
control. Tweening animations is ridiculously
easy - drag a sprite or cast member from
one position to another - scaling and/or
rotating alsong the way - from the original
position in the first keyframe to a final
position is the last keyframe. director
does all the real work and creates the animation.
The Cast window (Flash people
think Library) has also improved, with two
viewing options that read either as a list
of cast members or as a preview palette
of member icons. It's very simple to add
scripts directly to cast members with the
click of an icon at the top of the Cast
window.
The Library (Flash equivalent
is the Actions panel) is a fantastic tool
for assigning interactive events to sprites.
It's a wonderful drag and drop interface
with menus for controlling text, 3D cast
members, navigation, internet interactivity,
you name it. I found the Library very easy
to use after some initial hunting to find
specific scripts. Between assigning triggers
and actions to 3D events, I was delighted
at the user interface provided by pop-up
windows to customize the canned scripts.
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The Property Inspector (nearly
all the other Flash panels rolled into one)
gives you handy control over your sprites
and movie properties. You will find yourself
placing this bad boy in a comfortable position,
and using it becomes as natural as breathing
after a while. It better, anyhow, because
this window really is the gateway to editing
and refining you movie during the creative
process. It is context-sensitive, and using
tabbed panels allows you to surf around
your project and its components without
difficulty.
On a down note - I have to
admit to some disappointment with the Text
Inspector. I found the kerning, tracking
and leading of text to be pretty sketchy
and erratic. Text changes to a more rendered
appearance outside of the editing process,
and never seems to reflect its appearance
while editing. On the plus side, the Text
Inspector does provide you with the option
of instantly applying a URL to selected
text, making Internet linking simple and
straightforward.
Bottom Line
Director 8.5 is a beast. Its the
big dog in the interactive design and development
industry, and the new 3D support is incredibly
impressive. Most users will find it a bit intimidating
at first - and the manuals can be used for office
strength training workouts on your lunch break
(I can press Director, Final Cut Pro 3 and last
year's AIGA design annual with one arm, dude).
Director is worth not just a look, but a LONG
look, so you can really give yourself time to
get into the nitty gritty and do some cool things.
The first time you send a co-worker a cute little
animation that gives that plays a terribly rude
noise, followed by a system shutdown, is a magical
moment indeed.
(I acutally was going to put a link to a similar
file here - but I don't think alienating the
audience is a good idea.)
What I would like to see Macromedia
change in Director?
Cross-platform Projector support!
Currently, if you want to make a Windows-compatible
CD, you'll need a PC (or Virtual PC) and
a Windows version of Director to create
the Projector. That's a pretty steep price
to pay, considering that Flash supports
both platforms.
DVD authoring capabilites!
I don't know if this is really possible,
or really even a good idea, but using Director
to create DVD menus and content would be
fairly awesome.
Typography support! Embedding
fonts is good, but I want to be able to
really control my type to begin with - not
rely on crappy Microsoftesque rudimentary
type menus. Kerning, tracking and leading,
oh my!
Native OS X authoring and
Projector playback. Real memory managment
for a RAM - intensive program like sounds
like heaven to me.
The Verdict
Pure Lust - 4 bounces of the
magic apple. I'm giving Director top honors
- although it does have some rough spots,
it truly is in a class of its own.
- Joel
Davies
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