The world has changed a lot since Macromedias multimedia flagship, Director, was first launched. Back then the Web simply didnt exist, while today it has become the most important platform for multimedia delivery. Fortunately, with its general Web expertise and especially its Shockwave technology, Macromedia has been perfectly placed to transform Director into a truly Web-oriented application. With Director - unlike FreeHand (see p106) - this transformation has been both complete and convincing, ensuring that the renamed Director 8 Shockwave Studio is now the platform of choice for those sites determined to provide the richest possible Web experience.

Director might be the secret behind the most forward-looking sites on the Web, but youd never have known it from its own working environment. Directors long past is very evident in its underlying theatrical metaphor where you work with a cast of media elements, a stage where content is viewed, and a score to synchronise your project. Sadly, it isnt just this linear timeline-based approach thats old-fashioned.

Over the years, Directors interface has also been allowed to fall behind in crucial areas, while developments have been added piecemeal. The end result was an outdated and inefficient interface that largely disguised Directors underlying power.

Mercifully, with this new release, Macromedia has taken a grip. To begin with it has addressed the most obvious failings. You can now zoom in on the Stage at up to 800 per cent for accurate placement. More importantly, you can zoom out, up to 12 per cent, to leave more on-screen space for scripting. Even better, after zooming out, you can use the new pasteboard to set up animations that start or end off screen. You can also now add guides to the Stage to help placement, while new distribute commands make it easier to position sprites accurately and consistently. When youre happy with a sprite, you can now lock it to prevent accidental changes.

Even more fundamental are the changes to Directors on-screen palettes. In the past the Cast manager showed all the elements of your projects as icons. That was fine if you only had a few, but it quickly became a nightmare when you were dealing with hundreds. Now theres a List view where items can be quickly located by sorting on name, type, number, creation date and a new customisable comments field. The biggest change of all is the consolidation of a number of former palettes into the new Property Inspector. This offers a huge range of control over the currently selected object through its context-sensitive sprite, behaviour and member tabs and quickly becomes a main centre of work. The Inspector isnt just more efficient its also more powerful too, enabling shared properties of multiple objects to be updated simultaneously.
The interface revamp is by no means complete - the behaviour Library is just as awkward as its always been - but Director does feel far more streamlined in practice. In fact, in many ways Director now feels like a programming environment, especially if you use the Property Inspectors List view to show all parameters as Lingo properties. When working like this, the simple theatrical metaphor seems a long way away, but to make the most of Director you really do have to get to grips with its in-built scripting language, and this is an excellent way of picking up Lingo on the job. Another sign that Macromedia is taking Directors programming responsibilities more seriously is the ability to link to scripts externally. This means that you can use your favourite scripting environment to work on files, but it really comes into its own when enabling team working with professional version control.

Director might be the nearest thing there is to a multimedia standard, but in recent years it has fallen seriously behind rivals like Dazzler and even PowerPoint, in one of the most important areas of all, impact. The reason is simple. Large bitmaps and visually-rich transitions are by their very nature bandwidth-heavy and dont fit well with Web delivery. Director now offers a partial solution with its new run-time imaging. This gives developers control over the Shockwave rendering engine to enable graphic generation and various on-screen effects at the client end. Best of all, many of the transition effects can be applied on an individual sprite rather than full frame basis. Director 8 projects still dont have the highest production values, but the new imaging Logo commands and behaviours do enable a richer visual experience within the bandwidth constraints of the Web.

Another area that was previously limited by the restrictions of Web delivery, and that Director 8 now addresses, is sound. Director 8 now supports the import of AIFF, WAV, SND as well as the all-important streaming MP3. By using the new sound Lingo commands and behaviours you can mix, pan, seek, and pause multiple sounds. More importantly, you can cue and simultaneously start sounds with millisecond accuracy and control loop points dynamically at run-time. Putting this together you can create seriously impressive immersive sound effects where the volume and panning of a sprites audio change as the end user drags it around their screen. The process is labour-intensive and the end results arent state of the art, but Director 8 does raise the ceiling if not the roof.

When youve assembled and orchestrated all of the elements of your project, youre ready to publish it. As always you can produce a standalone Windows-only projector EXE for delivery on CD-ROM, but the main emphasis is on universal Web delivery through Shockwave. To enable this Director 8 provides an entirely new Publish Settings command that takes care of producing the necessary code through the use of customisable HTML templates, including a new option that displays a loader movie to provide some content while a larger project is preparing to play. To help keep bandwidth demands to a minimum, all bitmap media in the project can be JPEG compressed to a customisable quality setting.

Alternatively, you can use the optimise function of the bundled Fireworks 3 (Recommended, issue 29, p112) to fine-tune bitmaps individually.
By this stage its clear that Directors success depends almost entirely on its one unique selling point, its use of Shockwave as a delivery mechanism. Shockwave is undoubtedly Directors greatest strength but its also its greatest weakness. To begin with, it immediately means that if youre only interested in producing CD-ROM and kiosk projects youd be better off with another application that doesnt work to restricted bandwidth constraints and so can produce work with greater impact far more easily. Even if youre interested in cross-media work - and these days its hard to imagine that many users wont be - its worth pointing out a major issue that Macromedia has tended to obscure: there are actually two Shockwave standards.

Rather than the SWF (Shockwave Flash) files that Flash and FreeHand produce - and an increasing number of other developers including Corel and Adobe have announced support for - Director produces its own DCR (Shockwave Director) format files. If the end user wants to be able to view these files, they need the full Shockwave 8 player and not the small Flash player. This immediately restricts your potential audience.

While Macromedia now claims that well over 80 per cent of browsers can view Flash content, it doesnt put a percentage on Shockwave - though it does claim an installed base of 108 million users worldwide. Even more importantly, by their nature, most Flash movies can be replaced by an automatically generated animated GIF or image map so that all visitors will see something even without the Flash player. With the interactive, truly multimedia nature of Directors Shockwave productions, theres no fallback - its all or nothing.

These are certainly serious drawback