David C. Sebald, The University of Texas at San Antonio

Good afternoon. It's a pleasure to be back at the TDME conference this year to talk about one of my favorite subjects, educational applications of multimedia. Last year, my presentation covered a general introduction to that topic while simultaneously--and perhaps more importantly--attempting to be a whiz-bang demonstration of multimedia's possibilities. With five channel sound, photographic images, smooth animation and embedded interactive programs, the medium really was the message of that show and, judging from all the communications I received following it, it apparently impressed a lot of people.

To be honest, though, a large part of that show's success must be attributed to the tools I was using rather than to my production techniques. Without my Amiga 4000 and Scala, the presentation program that coordinated all the media, the show would have been very limited indeed. Typical Mac or PC multimedia software of that time-- presentation programs like PowerPoint and Persuasion, or authoring programs like Hypercard and Toolbook--simply didn't have the sophistication or the power that that type of presentation demanded.

Times change, however. The Amiga's manufacturer, Commodore Business Machines, went bankrupt last spring which pretty clearly spelled doom for that avant-garde machine. The manufacturers of equally sophisticated Amiga multimedia software like Scala went scrambling to adapt their products to other platforms, and most have not yet surfaced in their new guises. In the meantime, Pentiums and PowerMacs have begun to approach the Amiga's graphics/sound capabilities, and one software product has recently emerged which promises to take full advantage of these machine's multimedia potential.

Last summer, as the Amiga and its software slid over the precipice, I tried vainly to adapt some of my interactive music pedagogy programs to the Macintosh using HyperCard and also tried to port some of my classroom presentations to the PC and Mac using PowerPoint and Astound. The latter applications severely limited my desire for exact timings, smooth realistic animation, fast loads, and coordinated multichannel sound. And if using them seemed to be a step back in time, using HyperCard to create the realistic interactive simulations I was used to authoring seemed positively pre-Cambrian. Luckily, before I had completely despaired of ever again achieving the results I had seen on the Amiga, I discovered MacroMedia's Director 4.0.

Director 4.0 is a multimedia development environment that combines all the elements of flexible multimedia integration with a scripting power easily equaling that of HyperCard. Recent reviews have showered it with glowing praises like "Multimedia professionals will continue to find it the best package available (Sharp, 1995), " and "...now regarded as the #1 multimedia authoring program for the Macintosh (Magel, 1995), " and "Director for the Mac has been the standard in off-the-shelf authoring packages for serious multimedia creation for the better part of a decade. Its synchronization and animation capabilities can't be beat, regardless of platform" (Burger, 1995).

For those of us who develop multimedia applications there are several areas in which Director clearly excels. The first is animation speed. From its original conception it was optimized for animation and graphics movement on the screen rather than for static display. Compare what it can do with moving a 256 color image with what a program like HyperCard is capable of doing with only a two color image and you get a clear picture of Director's superiority in graphics manipulation. Although still not quite as smooth as in Scala on the Amiga, Director's text and objects can easily be made to move from position to position on my Mac's screen in a very acceptable fashion. Interestingly, this movement is not limited to high-end machines; it is fluid on most levels of Mac I've tried including my 8100 AV and my daughter's Performa.

As this presentation's opening cartoon sequence demonstrated, Director's optimized animation capability allows not just speed but also time critical coordination of sound and movement from Captain Cogno's footsteps to the lip sync as he spoke to introduce me. Should a real time animation ever become too complex to retain an acceptable speed, it is an easy matter in Director to convert it to QuickTime format so that a video accelerator card could bring it to 30 or even 60 frames per second.

Graphics manipulation on some programs is slowed by having too many elements in memory at once. Director's explicit memory management, however, allows the producer to specify which elements can be shifted in and out of memory and when this should occur. These elements can be shared with other applications.

The second aspect of Director's excellence lies in its flexibility. Most graphics and animation creation can be handled in the program's own integrated-- and quite powerful-- paint package. But if a developer needs to use outside sources, Director can import all standard graphics formats including BMP, EPS, Pnt, Scrapbook, DIB, GIF, Pict, Tiff, WMF, and Kodak's PhotoCD. Animation formats that can be imported include Pics, QuickTime, FLC/FLI, AVI, and Director's own format.

Sounds also can be digitally recorded without leaving Director, but for those who use external sound programs Director supports AIFF, WAV, SND, SoundEdit, and the new QuickTime MIDI emulation format. MIDI itself is controllable through external commands.

I would note one area of weakness in Director's sound capabilities: there is no internal support for changing pitch of a sample. This means that any musical instrument simulation must contain separate samples for every note of the instrument's scale.

Besides importing files from practically any source, Director allows the producer to create stand-alone run-time versions of his products to any Mac or Windows machine regardless of whether or not it has Director on it. (There are some caveats which will be discussed later.)

A third feature of Director is the fact that it is part of a whole family of Macromedia products designed for integrated multimedia creation-- that is, each of these products can easily use appropriate files created by the other application. They include Authorware, an object-oriented authoring environment; Action!, a presentation program; MacroModel, a 3d modeling program, SoundEdit 16, a popular program for sound digitizing and manipulation; and several volumes of sound and graphics clipmedia.

Fourth, Director is an amazingly well supported product. This is the only program I've ever used for which the support staff called me just to see how I was doing with my new version! It seems that every two months or so, I receive a new CD-ROM from MacroMedia which contains examples of other people's Director creations often in a format that allows examination. Upgrades are also furnished on CD-ROM accompanied by demo versions of companion products.

At least one readily available book currently supplements the four thick volumes that MacroMedia ships with Director. The MacroMedia Director Design Guide (Clarke & Swearingen, 1994), with its accompanying CD-ROM provides tips and examples that go far beyond what any product's manual could contain. In addition, for those who need a monthly fix of Director news and information, the MacroMedia User Journal is available

Like HyperCard, Director has many on-line forums where information, external commands and functions, and product examples can be shared. FTP sites with Director folders exist on the Internet from California to Ohio. Both AppleLink and America On-Line feature MacroMedia product forums.

Finally, what many would consider Director's biggest feature, the product is available on both Macintosh and Windows platforms. Director files are said by the company to be binary compatible across platforms, and although I have not tried it yet myself, I have seen demonstrations and recent reviews which seem to confirm this. A few paragraphs back, I mentioned a caveat to the statement that stand-alone run time versions of Director movies could be created for either Macintosh or Windows machines. The caveat is that if a product intended to be used on both platforms is created, then it must be transported to a development system on the other platform before it can be rendered as a stand-alone version for that machine.

Comparing Director's development interface with that of HyperCard immediately reinforces the impression that this program is designed for multimedia movement and sound. Rather than emulating HyperCard's "card" metaphor, Director, like a Disney animation, is based on a "frame" metaphor. A Director movie can contain just a few frames if it is composed of mostly static images, text windows, and navigation buttons like HyperCard. But if the producer wants to incorporate many animation elements-- even up to full-fledged animated movies--Director makes it very easy to create the thousands of frames that such a product would require. Frame rates run from 120 per second down to unlimited hold. Each frame or set of frames can be indexed and accessed for complete hypertextual navigation.

Director's production environment consists primarily of a Cast window which can hold up to 32,000 separate images, animations, sounds, scripts, etc., and a Score window, in which all of these elements can be coordinated in appearance and movement. Although there is a practical limit to how many elements can be coordinated at any one time-- the Score window contains channels for 48 simultaneous graphics elements and two sound channels-- there seems to be no limit to the number of frames that can be created

Other windows supplement the two basic ones mentioned above. These include a Control Panel window similar to VCR controls, Paint window for creating graphics, Script window helpful for programming interactive applications, Tools window for creating buttons and QuickDraw objects, Message window for monitoring an application's scripts, and a Text window which is handy for creating any longer blocks of text to be used in a production.

Multimedia producers who are comfortable with HyperCard scripting will find that authoring with Director's "Lingo" is very approachable. While not exactly alike, there is enough similarity between the two languages to make the switch painless. Lingo's vocabulary, with its 116 functions and 90 commands, is every bit as powerful as HyperCard's 74 functions and 96 commands. And, like HyperCard, Director's language can be extended with XCMDs and XFCNs. No two languages will exhibit the same ease in scripting everything that a producer wants to do; however in nearly a year of building interactive applications with Lingo, I have not yet found a problem that I couldn't solve.

MacroMedia Director has become my choice for developing my next generation of multimedia materials. Although at a street price of around $800 it is more expensive than HyperCard and its imitators, its capabilities make it the only real choice for authoring multimedia applications that a media-sophisticated population will accept. It is also available steeply discounted for educational use and in quantities of ten or more. I believe in it so strongly that I convinced UTSA to purchase ten copies for student use, and I now teach a multimedia production class that centers around it.