What is Macromedia Director 6.0?

Macromedia ups the ante in high-end multimedia authoring with version 6 of its flagship product, Director. It has been barely a year since the release of Director 5, so you might wonder what Macromedia could have packed into this latest rev. The answer: a lot.

If you’ve ever popped a CD-ROM into your machine, you’re probably familiar with what Director does; interactivity, cool animation, video, and sound. Just check out the MacAddict CD for a good example. Web cruisers will be familiar also with Shockwave, the technology that embeds interactive Director files into Web pages.

Somehow, Director has escaped the Great Interfece Makeover of 1997, undergoing only a few tweaks to bring it more in line with the Macromedia User Interface (see review of Macromedia FreeHand, Feb/97, p70). Buttons and key commands have been somewhat standardized across applications and platforms.

The most immediate changes are to Director’s Score — almost everything is in a different place. Score attributes such as ink and moveability have been moved to an Inspector-type bar across the top of the screen. New additions to the Score include pixel coordinate and pixel width and height displays for selected sprites, as well as beginning and end frame displays so you can see in numeric values exactly how big your sprite is, where it’s located on the Stage, and its frame duration. A welcome addition is a fixed-location script channel above Director’s increased number of sprite channels, which has been bumped to a total of 120. In previous versions of Director, sprites existed in the Score as discrete elements in each frame; now they exist as a single media element across frames. The most obvious benefit to this arrangement is that it’s much easier to align sprites across several frames. It also means users can set animation key frames dynamically for location and size and Director automatically will tween the paths. Old hands at Director will find it takes a while to get used to the way the new Score handles sprite ranges but that it provides a more consistent way of dealing with media on the Stage.

Perhaps the most useful new addition is Director 6’s implementation of Inspectors. Users have always been able to get some sprite information directly from the Score, but now that information and much more are available directly on the Stage and through the use of the Sprite Inspector. Sprites placed on the Stage now display sprite channel number, cast number and name (internal or external), inks, and attached scripts. With the Sprite Inspector, you can also get pixel-perfect x and y coordinates, height, width, and the rectangle of the sprite. The Inspector also makes setting inks and scripts easy by providing access to pop-up menus for both.

The Text Inspector is a formatting dream. All the attributes of the old Modify>Text window are now just one click away, and the results show up immediately on the Stage or in text fields.

Another nice feature in the revision is a Netscape Navigator-style External Editors preference. By selecting a media type, you can assign dedicated applications to launch and edit the cast member. When you’re finished editing, save the cast member, and Director will relink to an external file or reimport internally stored files. This is a big improvement over Director 5’s limited external editor support, which essentially required other Macromedia applications. Director 6 also supports additional file formats, including BMP, TIFF, and WAV.

The biggest leap in performance between Director 5 and 6 is in Shockwave authoring. Web developers no longer have to author, burn a Shockwave file with Afterburner (Director 5’s plug-in compiler for Shockwave files), embed the file in an HTML file, and launch a browser to see if things are working properly. In Director 6, you simply save your project as Shockwave from the File menu so you can run and test your Shockwave work from within the authoring environment, as if it were a regular Director file. Director 6 treats all Director-created files alike. Both the authoring environment and Projectors can run normally protected movie files, Shockwave files, or both, directly from disc. From an authoring standpoint, this is a tremendous feature.

One unfortunate side of Shockwave-based interactivity is the long download time; Shockwave file sizes commonly range from 100K to 2MB. Authors got around this shortcoming by stringing together smaller files and judiciously preloading them. Director 6 eliminates this problem with streaming Shockwave files. Now, you can create an opening sequence that plays almost immediately, while the rest of the Shockwave file loads in the background. Cleverly designed files should be able to make the download nearly transparent.

In addition to streaming Shockwave, Director 6 offers other Internet and portability improvements. Projectors now can place calls directly to graphics or text located on the Web for multimedia titles with more current images or text. You now can author what Macromedia and other multimedia developers have taken to calling “hybrid” CDs (a term that used to refer to Mac/PC titles), which hook direcdy into the Internet for timely content while providing high-bandwidth media such as video and audio on a disc. Also new to Director is the ability to embed Xtras components, such as Killer Transitions from g/matter or Integration New Media’s V-12 Database engine, within Projector files for more reliable distribution over online services or CD.

One of the better additions is the Behaviors Library. Common “activities” are preprogrammed for you and stored in an external cast (Director’s media storage library) that’s accessible through the Xtras menu. You pick these activities through the Behaviors Inspector, which also lets you set triggers such as MouseDown, EnterFrame, or MouseWithin. Behaviors accompfish common activities such as going to a specific frame in the score, swapping cast members, or playing a sound. The library also lets you create and include your own activities. Although the behaviors are a nice touch, they haven’t been implemented as well as mTropolis’ drag-and-drop simplicity. By contrast. Director’s behaviors interface is clumsy and feels like a “me too” effort at making the program more object oriented.

Still, there are several things that make Director 6 less than the Platonic multimedia authoring environment. Accessing a lot of features requires a right-button chck of the mouse. Most Mac mice don’t have a right button, so you have to Control-click to get to pop-up menus. Also, Director has long suffered from a proliferation of windows and palettes, and the Inspectors additions make matters even worse. If you don’t already work on two monitors, Director 6 likely will send you screaming for more screen real estate.
Unless you are planning to upgrade from a previous version of Director or the Director Multimedia Studio, you’re going to have to shell out for the full Director 6 Multimedia Studio Package. The price is steep — $999 — but it includes other Macromedia products: xRes 3, Extreme 3D 2, and SoundEdit 16 2. Director 6 is not sold separately, and Deck II, part of Studio 5, is no longer included.

These quibbles aside. Director 6 is a big improvement. Upgrading is mandatory for anyone doing Shockwave work, and traditional multimedia authors also will find a lot to like. Overall, the upgrade is a solid improvement and further entrenches Director as the authoring standard to beat.

Sanchez, Rick. (September 1997). Director 6. MacAddict. (pgs. 60-61).

Download Macromedia Director 6.0 for Mac

Architecture

68K + PPC (FAT)

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: SheepShaver