Macromedia Director 8 Shockwave Studio For A True Multimedia Experience Try Director 8 Shockwave Studio Douglas Smith
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!
