Macromedia Director has always been the Orson Welles of multimedia authoring: hard to work with, but the best in the business. It goes beyond simply letting you combine text, graphics, video, audio, and animation into interactive productions; its built-in painting and animation features, powerful Lingo scripting language, and performance-tuning commands make Director the multimedia tool of choice for professional developers.
But if multimedia professionals swear by Director, newcomers are more likely to swear at it. Some history may help explain why: Director was designed to produce linear animations (played from start to finish). Macromedia added Lingo to control the playback of a project, but Director’s timeline-oriented beginnings are still apparent in the way it forces developers to implement interactivity with a user interface that wasn’t designed for it. Director 5.0 does nothing to shrug off that reputation for being difficult, but once you see this new version, you may be willing to overlook its character flaws.
The Director Way
Director stores media elements — bitmapped graphics, text, interactive buttons, and so on — in a database known as a cast. You can import elements created in other programs (Director supports more file formats than any other authoring program) or use Director’s content-creation tools to generate cast members.
In previous versions of Director, a project could have only one cast. Director 5 supports multiple casts, any of which can be shared — that is, stored separately from the project file. The result is far more flexibility in structuring, developing, and distributing projects.
You do most of your work in the Score window, a timeline made up of frames into which you place media elements... By alternating between the Score window and the Stage, the large window where those elements appear, you can position items, animate them, control when they’re present, and define how they interact with other elements. With Director’s Control Panel, you can play the project and step through it a frame at a time.
Adding interactivity often means wrestling with Director’s instinctive desire to play your project from start to finish. To create a button that branches to a different screen, for example, you assign a name to the frame where the second screen begins, then attach to the button a Lingo script that tells Director to play the named frame. If you want a certain screen to remain visible until a user clicks on an interactive object, you have to add a script that pauses or loops playback.
New and Improved
Although Director 5’s basic operating style is unchanged from that of earlier versions, Macromedia has improved the interface. A variety of new tool bars and floating palettes allow fast access to oftenused commands; the script window’s popup menus provide easy access to Lingo keywords; and the new Lingo debugger windows let you track down script problems and monitor the contents of variables.
Lingo itself has also been significantly enhanced, with new keywords that support Director 5's multiple casts as well as enhanced memory management, character-string handling, and control for QuickTime movies.
Director 5 also has tighter links to Sound Edit 16; you simply double-click on a sound to launch SoundEdit 16 (if you have the RAM, that is — Director’s preferred memory size is 12MB, while SoundEdit’s is 10MB).
To help you work with graphics and lay out screens, Macromedia has added some features you won’t find in any other authoring program. For example, the paint window makes animation easier with its onion-skinning mode, which lets you see dimmed versions of the frames adjacent to the active one.
The new version supports Adobe Photoshop filters and lets you create animated filter effects. Director can nowpreload movies in the background while other tasks are executing. And it has finally caught up with other programs in providing object-alignment features.
Vastly improving on Director 4’s bare-bones text-editing window, Director 5 has a built-in word processor complete with a formatting ruler and a tool bar that supports character formatting, variable line spacing, justification, and kerning. Director can also import files saved in Rich Text Format, so you can format text using your favorite word processor.
The moment you finish editing text. Director antialiases it (smooths its edges). To include antialiased text in any other authoring program, you have to create it in a program like Adobe Photoshop. A minor drawback is that text can’t be both antialiased and searchable.
Built for Expansion
Director’s new expansion architecture lets you add third-party plug-ins, or Xtras, that enhance the program’s features anil data-type support. Besides demo versions of many Xtras, the Director CD-ROM includes several functional plug-ins. Macromedia is putting the finishing touches on other Xtras that will let you import and use QuickDraw 3D models and QuickTime VR movies. These Xtras should he available free from Macromedia’s Web site by the time you read this.
And since no program these days is complete without hooks to the Web, Macromedia last year released Shockwave for Director. This freeware lets you create Director productions that can be played back from a Web site. Although the original Shockwave isn’t compatible with Director 5, the next version promises to support many Director 5 enhancements, including movie preloading. Web surfers will have to download the new plug-in to play Shockwave movies.
How Director Compares
Director 5’s closest competitors in highend authoring are Allegiant's SuperCard and mFactory’s mTropolis.
Director 5’s animation, screen-layout, and file-import features are vastly superior to SuperCard’s. Director also gives you more precise control over media resources so you can optimize performance and memory use, and projects created in Director are faster than their SuperCard counterparts. Macromedia also offers a Windows version of Director for cross-platform support; a SuperCard run-time editor for Windows is still in the works.
To be fair, SuperCard's database capabilities are superior to Director’s, as is its support for common Macintosh user interface elements: adding multiple windows, floating palettes, dialog boxes, hierarchical menus, and the Apple menu to a Director project is difficult at best. For projects that rely more on standard user interface elements than on flashy animation, SuperCard may he a better choice — provided you can wait to ship a Window's run-time player.
mTropolis 1.0 is a more formidable contender. Its animation features are impressive (though not as strong as Director’s), and its object orientation makes it much easier to learn. mTropolis’s groundbreaking ability to assign behaviors to objects can make game development easier than in Director. And you can create Windows run-time players in mTropolis; to create a Windows version of a Director project, you need Director for Windows. But at $4995, mTropolis isn’t within everyone’s budget. The entire Director Multimedia Studio — which also includes xRes, Extreme 3D, SoundEdit 16 2.0, and Deck II 2.5— is only $1999. And mTropolis’s screen-layout and textmanipulation features can’t hold a candle to Director 5’s.
The Last Word
In the end, many of Director 5’s advantages stem from its maturity. This program has been a major-league multimedia development tool for a long time, and Macromedia and third-party plug-in makers have done an excellent job of giving developers what they need.
The linear operating style still takes some getting used to, but Director 5’s interface enhancements streamline much of the development process. If you’ve craved Director’s power in the past hut opted for an easier authoring program, it may be time to give Director another look. And if you’re a Director veteran, Christmas has arrived early.
Heid, Jim. (July 1996). Director 5.0. Macworld (pgs. 52-53).
Macromedia, Inc.
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mm-director-5.sit
Emulating this? It could probably run under: 
Basilisk II
