What is MacroMind Director 3.1.1?

MacroMind Director users looking to incorporate QuickTime movies into their presentations need wait no longer. The latest upgrade to Macromedia’s venerable 2-D-aninimation and authoring tool features QuickTime support along with several new Lingo commands and a long list of bug fixes.

Director Links

Director's newly added QuickTime support lets you import QuickTime movies just as you would any other image file and position them on the Director stage. As an alternative to importing movie files, you can link disk-based movies to Director animations and edit them with external editing programs.

You can open a window in Director that displays QuickTime’s standard transport controls, enabling you to preview movies before placing them on the Director stage. You can loop imported movies within Director, but unfortunately the program doesn’t provide a visual loop-status indicator. You can also move QuickTime movies across the screen as they play and create unique effects with Director's Trails mode, which leaves each played frame in the wake of the movie as it travels across the screen.

Macromedia has updated several Director controls to make them QuickTime-smart. For example, if you place a QuickTime movie in an animation, a new option will let you prompt Director to wait until the movie is finished playing before the program proceeds to the next frame in the sequence.
As with some other QuickTime-compatible programs, imported QuickTime movies play with noticeable visual and audio jerkiness in Director, To get around this problem, you can use HyperCard XCMDs from within Director to play QuickTime movies instead of using Direector’s facilities. (This technique also enables you to play QuickTime movies with Director by the way.) Another workaround to the jerkiness problem is MovieShop, an Apple utility (available free on AppleLink) that eliminates most QuickTime playback-synchronization problems.

Version 3.1 sports several QuickTime-specific enhancements to Lingo, Director's programming language. With Lingo, you can do such things as change the playback speed and direction (forward/reverse) of QuickTime movies and ascertain their duration, check to see if QuickTime is present on playback machines, and more.

Macromedia has further enhanced Lingo in numerous ways unrelated to QuickTime. Most noteworthy is a new Lingo command that checks to see how much RAM is required to play a range of frames. This feature is particularly useful if you're creating animations destined for playback on other Macs.

Outgoing Animations

In addition to letting you incorporate QuickTime movies into animations. Director allows you to export animations, complete with Director’s two sound channels, as QuickTime movies. The program provides full support for the standard QuickTime compression options, and you can scale your output as you save it.

Director's QuickTime output facilities don't support pixel dissolves, though — a major drawback. Also, the program doesn't handle custom 8-bit palettes, which may be a problem for Director users who rely on custom palettes.

Director 3.1’s list of bug fixes is a long one. Most notable are those affecting anti-aliasing: The program now supports interruptible anti-aliasing and includes anti-aliasing support for the Macintosh Display Card•GC.

The new package also includes the MacroMind Accelerator, which previously was sold separately for $195. Accelerator executes frame differencing on Director tiles at full screen size, which dramatically speeds the playback rate. Unfortunately, once you have accelerated a movie, you can't convert it to QuickTime.

Also new is an optional CD-ROM package that includes the full Director application, an extensive set of sample animation files, Lingo code samples, and the valuable Macromedia technical-support database. The database is stored in several formats on the disc: FileMaker Pro, tab-delimited text, and SYLK.

Biedny, David. (January 1993). Director 3.1. MacUser. (pg. 56).

Download MacroMind Director 3.1.1 for Mac

Architecture

Motorola 68K

Compatibility notes

Emulating this? It could probably run under: Basilisk II