Macromedia Director 8 Shockwave Studio Pittsburgh PA

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Originally published at Internet.com

What's New?
Have you ever wanted to add multimedia to your Web site but thought that it was too difficult and required a lot more knowledge than you might possess? Macromedia Director 8 Shockwave Studio(Director) is here to the rescue-allowing even a true novice to create and developing magnetic Internet destinations and powerful multimedia. Director combines graphics, sound, animation, text, and video to create streaming, multi-user, interactive Web content that is easy to deploy for CD-ROM, DVD-ROM, and the Web.

Now Director is not a new product but an enhanced version of an already popular program with many new features and changes to make it more powerful and easy to use. With Director you can create business presentations, advertising kiosks, interactive entertainment and educational products with ease, and you can probably think of many other ways to use it.

New in this version is a Property Inspector that automatically switches context to match the current selections and a Zoomable stage which allows shrinking or expanding of the Stage window during authoring. Cast Window List View is a quick way to display cast members and change properties. Also enhancing this version: Asset Management Fields on the Cast Window, Linked Scripts which let you store scripts in external text files, and Bitmap Compression allowing JPEG compression for bitmap members in a DCR. Director now incorporates Lockable Sprites, which help prevent unintentional modifications during authoring, Guides to help place elements precisely, a new Publish Command for Shockwave movies, Scalable Shockwave (to stretch Shockwave movies to fit the window), Multiple Curve Vectors, Inline IME for Japanese operating systems for that double byte text, Imaging Lingo for creating and manipulating bitmap images, and Sound Control Lingo for precise, professional quality control of sound.

System resources for Director don't appear to be as demanding as we had anticipated given the size of the program and the multimedia it handles. A pentium class machine with 32 MB of RAM and 100 MB of free disk space will get you started but you'd best remember to reserve a lot extra space for your presentations and movies as you create them. Supported Operating systems are Windows 98, NT 4.0, 2000 or Mac 8.1 or higher, we felt during our testing that at least a pentium class PC with a 200 MHz processor and 60 MB of RAM is better.

The Good and the Bad
The tutorial for Director is excellent and takes you step by step through the creation of your first multimedia experience right through publication. Ease of use is the key here though, a lot of thought and listening to customers make this version of Director an improvement over the last release. We could actually create a multimedia presentation for our website in less than an hour. After completion of our presentation, it ran smoothly and displayed well on a 90 MHz pentium via the Web.

Like most of Macromedia's resources we were able to access tons of help files and examples, plug-ins, and the Tech Support was only a mouse click away. We tried getting answers to our tougher questions via e-mail and found the response time adequate. Finding our way around on the Web site was also straight-forward.

Some areas that we did have a problem with were in the types of multimedia imports that were available. We wanted to import some Windows Media .ASF format files but found that Director doesn't support them. Also Real Producer formatted files were not supported at this time as well. A chat with Tech Support found us being assured that they were listening to their customers and that a lot of similar requests had been made. They felt Director would be going into the import of these formats in the future. Only QuickTime type format is supported. If you want to use the import of other formats they will have to be converted first.

How Does It All Stack Up?
Director is by far one of the premier programs on the market today, and even though there are lots of companies that have similar programs, none can do all that you can do with Director. A lot of major players in the corporate sector use Shockwave presentations and many use Macromedia's Director for these presentations. Real Producer can create movies but without animation, Windows Media tools can capture video and create video .ASF formatted video but the true multimedia experience can only be done using Director 8 Shockwave Studio. Many others boast to be the best, and even though they probably do a lot of things well, only Director is the real SHOCKWAVE!
Next: Using Director 8 Shockwave Studio

What's Director 8 Really Like?
Well, installation of Director was really very easy and took less than a minute to install-there were no compatibility issues to speak of. Upon executing the program you were given the opportunity to register, which we highly recommend since the tech support is excellent and there are many helpful tools and information available once you register the product. Documentation and packaging is very good, the instruction manual has just about all the information that you will need with the first few pages highlighting what you can do with the program going directly into the tutorial which we highly recommend that you take.

When we first took our initial look at the interface of Director we were overwhelmed to say the least, but after reading a few pages of the manual we realized that many of the windows that we were confronted with could be moved or minimized so that we could do something else. The tutorial takes you through Creating a new movie, cast members, and sprites, terms that you will quickly recognize after diving deeper into the tutorial. You will also learn how to use links, create animation, import media, synchronize sound, attach behaviors, control streaming over the Web, and finally publish your finished presentation! Now this sounds like a lot but actually only took us about an hour, with no real knowledge of what we were doing other than taking the guided tour prior to running the tutorial.

There is a full version of the Garden Chat tutorial in the program folders so that, at anytime during the tutorial, you can see what you are to end up with. We found that as you went along some things seemed repetitious but really were only done to show you the next step that makes it all seem simple. My 11 year old created a small multimedia presentation in a couple of hours that was really good, but they say kids have talent that some adults just can't seem to catch on to! For the most part, though, developing in Director was as easy as it gets and with a little practice you should be able to create really professional results in no time.

How About Animation?
This was the part we liked best of all: using Sprites, which is merely a single cast member on Stage or in a Score, we could change the order of our Cast Members. Using a Time method along with a frame-by-frame ordering, we could do some pretty complex animation. We mentioned a Stage and a Score. Well, the Stage is the visible portion of a movie on which you determine where your media elements will appear. The Score is where you organize and control a movie's content over time or where you produce the animation sequence. These are really big players in producing content within Director and after following the tutorial you will become very familiar with them. You will also use Lingos quite a bit when building your animation. A Lingo is a behavior that is pre-written in the form of a script that will provide interactivity and add interesting effects to your movies.

What Else Can I Do With Director 8?
Some other features of Director are that you can create stand alone presentations that can be put on CD or disk, and you can even create executables to run anytime on any machine that you want. Also included with Director 8 Shockwave Studio is the Shockwave Multi-user Server which will allow you to build Multi-user communities in minutes. With these communities you can easily create rich-media multi-player games and entertaining Shockwave content or collaborate with partners worldwide through shared whiteboard and business chat applications. Also, these days multiple OS platforms are very common, and with Director 8 Shockwave Studio, if you are delivering exclusively for Shockwave Player, you can deliver cross-platform Shockwave content using either the Macintosh or Windows version of Director. You do not need both versions of Director to ensure that Shockwave content is viewable across platforms (though you should test your Shockwave content on all platforms where you expect users to view it).

We have just touched on some of the many features and reasons that you should try Director if your plans include adding multimedia to your Web or creating very dynamic presentations to show your business off to others locally or around the world.
Next: The Bottom Line

Throughout this review we have hit on various features that we felt were worth mentioning and that you the reader would probably ask about this software package. We couldn't tell you everything about the product in this limited allotted space but we are confident that you will try the limited trial copy from the Macromedia Web Site and give it a spin yourself, and at that point you can be the judge. From the testing that we did with Director 8 and the various machines and operating systems that we tried it on we were quite pleased. Not being graphical experts ourselves made this review all that much more enjoyable for me since the learning curve was quite easy to say the least. Creating a usable end product is what software is suppose to be all about, and with Director we were able to do just that.

As we mentioned earlier the interface is kind of busy with all of the windows when you first start the program and this can be attributed to all of the many things that you can do with Director 8. But don't be dismayed because if you follow the tutorial you will see that there is a reason and purpose for them all, and you can move them around at will. We were very pleased with what we saw and believe that Director 8 stands all alone in the various ways that you can create a true multimedia experience. You can probably search and find similar products that cost a lot more but dollar for dollar this one stands alone!

Back: For A True Multimedia Experience Try Director 8 Shockwave Studio