When it comes to multimedia authoring software, Macromedia's Director is the undisputed industry standard. Ian Waugh puts music, video and graphics together with the Windows version...

You just can't escape the multimedia bandwagon. In case you think it hasn't affected you yet, think again.

There are already several artists who have produced interactive music/graphic CD ROMs, and now many games and CD ROM titles such as Star Trek: The Next Generation, are put together using a multimedia authoring package such as Director. In fact, it's probably true to say that the majority of multimedia producers use Director. It's been the leading program on the Apple Mac for a good few years.

Put simply, Director lets you combine graphics, animation, video clips, text and sound into one humungous production. This could be a storybook-type animation, a sales presentation, training material or an illustrated catalogue of goods or even sounds. At its most sophisticated, the program can be highly interactive, allowing the user to make multiple choice selections to the extent of creating their own games.

And the good news is, you don't have to be a computer programmer to do it. Well, you do need a little bit of expertise, but we'll get to that in a moment.

A PC for me

Prior to the launch of Director for Windows, the program had only been available on the Mac platform. You could run Director productions on a PC, but you had to use another program to convert it, and then you had to play it with Director Player for Windows.

The release of Director version 4 for both the Mac and Windows puts an end to all that. All movies produced with the latest version are cross-platform compatible.

Just as sequencers tend to use a multi-track tape recorder analogy for creating music, Director adopts a film production approach. The finished product is called a movie, and the program uses 11 windows to produce, store and connect various items, although you only need five of them to create a simple animation, for example.

"What can Director do for you? Basically, anything!"

The Stage window is where the action tales place. It's the big screen on which your story/presentation/animation/game unfolds. You pick your players from the Cast window. This doesn't just hold characters, but all the items you would use in a production such as graphics, text, sound, video, buttons for users to click on and so on. It's a bit like a database.

The Score is a bit like a spreadsheet. It keeps track of all the Stage items throughout each frame of the movie. It's divided into cells, frames and channels, and effectively looks like a grid with the time running from left to right. A cell is simply one of the squares, and contains information about a certain cast member at a particular time in the movie.

A frame is a column of cells, and contains all the information on each cast member at a particular time on the movie. A channel is a row of cells, each of which will typically control a different cast member such as the background, sprites, text and so on. There are 48 channels, so there is the potential to control 48 items at the same time. There are also six special channels devoted to effects, sound, sprites and so on.

Action stations

Let's look at an example to make things clear. If there was a man running across the screen, each subsequent cell in that man's channel would show the man moving further across the screen. Another channel would control the background. If this was static, each cell would be the same.

When you play a movie, the timer moves from one frame or column to the next, carrying out the instructions it finds in each of the cells. The process isn't particularly complicated, and there are some excellent tutorial movies to ease you into it.

You can create simple presentations using the mouse and PC's keyboard. To produce an animation, for example, you can define an object and use the mouse to move it across the screen in real-time. You can also move it more slowly in step-time or, alternatively you can define start and end points and an 'inbetween' function will do the rest.

"Put simply, Director lets you combine graphics, animation, video clips, text and sound into one humungous production"

However, the real power of the program only comes to the fore when you delve into Lingo, Director's programming language. This is probably as close to English as programming languages get, but it's programming nonetheless. And it's fairly essential to learn a bit of Lingo if you want to get into Director's more exciting areas of interactivity. There are three very interesting tutorial movies based heavily on it, which will be a great aid in learning how to use the program.

Through Lingo, you can also control external devices such as CD ROMs and play MIDI files. Yes, strange as it may seem, there is no point-and-click way of incorporating MIDI in a movie.

Director has, however, very good support for digital audio. Two channels are dedicated to it, and you can slow down or stop the movie while the music plays. This can be a useful way of ensuring everything stays together. The program supports Window's WAV files of course, and also AIFF files, which you will need to use if you want to play your movies on the Mac.

When you've finished your movie, you can save it as a stand-alone program called a Projector. This cannot be edited, not even by Director itself, so it prevents the competition examining the insides of your handiwork. The good news is, you don't need a license to distribute Projectors, although you do have to include copyright notices.

Beyond basics

That's the basics of Director, although there's a heck of a lot more to the package than that. For example, it has over 50 built-in transitions, which are used to get from one scene to the next. They include fades and wipes (where one scene slides in front of another). You can even use transitions to create simple animations. There are also auto animation functions to create things such as banners, credits, zoom text and so on.

There are no less than five manuals, although you don't have to read all of them immediately. There are a couple of excellent manuals on Learning Director and Lingo, and then you can dig into Using Director, which covers the functions in more detail. It's actually quite easy to start using the program, and the tutorials will have you creating a simple animation within a couple of hours.

What can Director do for you? Basically, anything. As a musician you could use it to put pictures to your music — or do what the big boys have with done, and create an interactive music CD ROM. If you have a video capture card, you could include footage of a live performance.

If you have an Apple Mac, you can buy Director for that, but this latest version makes the program available to the larger PC market. One point to note about the crossplatform compatibility however, is that although movies can be loaded into either computer, Projectors will only run on the computer they were produced on. Until someone comes up with a conversion program, the only way to create Projectors to play on both platforms, is to buy two copies of Director!

Director is one of the leading multimedia authoring programs, and you can't go far wrong using it. The main drawback is likely to be the price (do shop around), but you do get a lot of program for your money. And do allow yourself a few weeks to become fully conversant the program, before creating your multimedia masterpiece.