Despite a few snags, upgrade offers impressive benefits
David Biedny and Nathan Moody
Rating: Very Good (4 of 5 mice)
Longtime users of Macromedia's Director, the world's leading animation and multimedia-authoring program, will find much to like in the program's latest upgrade, a revision that also makes the dauntingly complex program more approachable for beginners. Enhancements in Director 5 address long-standing flaws in the program, simplify common tasks, and boost the program's overall speed and flexibility. Despite a few bugs, Director 5 should be considered a mandatory upgrade for all Director users.
Director 5 retains its predecessor's vast array of tools for creating and editing interactive multimedia programs, but a new interface design -- including tool bars, buttons, and streamlined palettes -- makes program functions more accessible. By making tool functionality more obvious, the new design also lessens Director's still steep learning curve. So does a new online help system, one of the best we've seen, which reduces Director's printed documentation by about a third.
Beyond the new interface, one of the first changes experienced users will notice in Director 5 is the ability to create multiple casts, or libraries of animations, images, and other media for building Director projects. Previous versions of Director limited you to one cast per project. Version 5 enables you to organize casts on a scene-by-scene basis and to create templated scenes you can reuse by switching casts.
Another new feature that simplifies scene creation is the ability to overlay a snap-to grid on the Stage -- the active area where a Director movie's action takes place. This grid makes it much easier to arrange multiple objects and characters on the Stage. A buggy implementation limits its usefulness, however: If you don't create a grid at the outset of a project, you may not be able to turn it on later.
The new onionskinning feature is better implemented. When you are animating a particular cast member, you can use this feature to see ghosted images of other nearby cast members as they appear in the current scene or in past or future scenes. This is a great help in coordinating object motions.
Director 5 at long last addresses one of the program's greatest historical weaknesses, type handling. Director can now generate anti-aliased type, which greatly improves the appearance of titles, labels, and other text. Even better, it can also handle real-world typographic formatting -- basic kerning, tracking, leading, indents, and tabs. These advancements are welcome, although there's still room for improvement: Support for tabs and indents is weaker than we'd like, for instance. And anti-aliasing is confined to text you create as the author; text the user types in (a player name in a game, for example) is not anti-aliased. Additionally, although Director can now import raw text and RTF (Rich Text Format) files as cast members, many RTF attributes are not preserved, and we'd still like to see direct support for popular word-processing formats.
Director's paint module, long considered its weakest link, gets a much needed boost from the addition of support for Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Premiere plug-ins. The new Auto Filter tool even lets you apply some Photoshop filters over time, by "tweening" from the unfiltered image to the transformed final one over as many frames as you specify. Unfortunately, only a small subset of the available Photoshop filters can be applied this way. Furthermore, using Auto Filter produced a variety of annoying redraw problems.
Not content with supporting a competitor's plug-in scheme, Macromedia has introduced a new plug-in architecture for Director itself. You can now use plug-ins called Xtras to add new tools directly to Director. Out-of-the-box Xtras include Animation Wizards -- which automatically create simple text effects such as animated bullet charts, zooming, and scrolling -- and a utility for batch-updating earlier versions of Director documents.
Lingo, Director's programming language, continues to enjoy meaningful improvements in version 5. More than 100 new commands have been added, including scripting for Shockwave files (the format for playing Director projects on the Web). Code execution is significantly faster, and an interactive debugger replaces Director's largely useless message window.
General playback improvements include the ability to preload a Director 5 movie in the background while another is playing, which boosts the speed of launching a movie within a movie. And Director's tools for optimizing playback from CD-ROM remain unmatched.
The price of Director has gone down significantly, especially in a new bundle, called Macromedia Studio 2, that also includes Macromedia's other production applications -- xRes, Extreme 3D, DECK II, and SoundEdit 16 -- for $999. The interaction among the various Macromedia applications has been enhanced, with standardized interfaces and a new cross-application common scripting language. For example, double-clicking on an audio cast member in Director automatically launches SoundEdit 16. Although we're pleased by the pricing, we're sorry to see that technical support for Director is now free for just 90 days from your first help call; after that, you have to cough up a hefty fee for continued support, a drawback for individual users and small production studios.
The Bottom Line
Nearly every enhancement in Director 5 makes the program more useful for professional multimedia developers. And although we're looking forward to a bug-fix upgrade in the near future, the flaws we uncovered were annoying but not project-threatening. These shortcomings aside, Director remains the most comprehensive authoring and multimedia-production tool available for use on the Mac and on Windows platforms.
Director 5, $850, or $999 as part of Macromedia Studio 2 (estimated street). Company: Macromedia, San Francisco, CA; 800-326-2128 or 415-252-2000; http://www.macromedia.com/. Reader Service: Circle #405.
REVIEWS / multimedia authoring
Via the Auto Filter tool, Director lets you interpolate some third-party Photoshop filters over time, like this gradual erosion effect in Xaos Tools' Paint Alchemy.
