Streaming Multimedia for the Web

by Tom Connell

Macromedia's Director has long been the standard for authoring sophisticated, multi-layered, interactive multimedia presentations. Many Web authors have yearned to incorporate similar capabilities on their sites. Macromedia has responded by expressly repurposing the latest version of Director. It's the sophisticated and powerful big brother to Flash, Macromedia's vector animation package for the Web - the Cadillac to Flash's Buick - and gives Web authors as much as they can handle in multimedia authoring possibilities.
July 15, 1999

Director's authoring paradigm is theatrical. You're the big cheese, controlling the antics and actions of a "cast" of objects along a common timeline. You build your show from a combination of drag n drop shticks ("behaviors" - there are 100 of these included), on-the-fly animations and specific cues and contingencies (an object-oriented, JavaScript-like scripting format called "Lingo" enables this). Here's a typical Director movie - one of the tutorial files supplied with the program.

Action takes place on a resizable window called the Stage. Here you summon and push around the objects of your desire: text, vector and bitmap images, videos, Shockwave movies, audio snippets, any kind of media, really. You can create these "sprites" out of whole cloth with a variety of Director-native vector and bitmap creation tools, or import them from outside. Once invoked, they're stored in a library from which you can access and freely modify all their properties. The ones you designate for a particular movie reside in an Internal Cast window.

The Score is where you orchestrate your casts' behavior over time. Anyone who has used an audio sequencer such as Cakewalk or multi-layered graphics programs like PhotoShop will be in familiar territory. Each element can be assigned a unique channel (like audio tracks or PhotoShop layers) - up to 1000 channels are possible. Action plays out at a rate of up to 999 frames per second, so extremely smooth and complex animations are possible.

Animation possibilities are manifold, and you can affect almost every possible parameter of your cast members - size, scaling, skewing, rotation, movement paths, alpha channels, and tints. You can do frame-by-frame animation or smoothly interpolate changes using "tweening" (for a more in-depth look at tweening see our review of Flash.

You can also attach pre-built "behaviors" to cast members to add instant animation, interactive features or sub-objects. Director comes with a library of 100 of these, which are essentially snippets of Lingo code (Lingo is Director's proprietary object-oriented scripting language). Drag behaviors on to cast members to make 'em hop. Animation behaviors include things like color cycling, fading, rotations, zooming, and swaying. You can add controls, drop-down menus, connectors, ToolTips, rollover buttons; customize hypertext and navigational features. There's much more - too much to list everything - in short, you can really get going with the pre-built behaviors before even touching Lingo. Each of the behaviors is customizable within a Behavior Inspector window that gives you access to all parameters.

If you want to take total control and build even more complex scenarios with lots of if/then/else possibilities, start writing custom Lingo snips and scripts to control objects' behavior. Lingo is one the aspects that sets Director apart from Flash. It's an extensive scripting language that (in the hands of someone who knows what they're doing) can grant incredibly fine control over every aspect of the movie. Director ships with a full Lingo dictionary for those who want to delve deeply.

Once you're finished, export the movie as a Shockwave file (using the supplied Aftershock encoder), and it's ready to stream over the Web or play in a standalone "projector." Another nice feature: Director lets you save movies as ready-to-roll Java applets.

Director 7 SIS is massively sophisticated and diving right in is not for the faint of heart. But the help files and manual are excellent, and it should be accessible at the basic level to anyone with a little experience with something like Flash or audio sequencing. It's a complex authoring environment for producing lush and multi-layered presentations that will still stream with reasonable alacrity to anyone who's Shockwaved (which is pretty much everyone these days).

If you're just producing animated banners or splash pages, go with Flash. If you need true interactivity and complex, multi-leveled information flow, however - a full-blown, multi-player game, an interactive tutorial, a high-end, feature-laden sales presentation, for examples - get Director. You'll pay about 700 bucks on the street but you'll also have Fireworks, one of the most versatile Web graphics packages around. Verdict - a Cadillac product like PhotoShop. It may be more than you need, but if you've got the bucks and the work - do it.