Macromedia Director 8 Shockwave Studio Using Director 8 Shockwave Studio Douglas Smith
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.
