Macromedia Director :: GCSE Business Marketing Coursework

Macromedia Director Overview and Introduction What Macromedia is and what can it do for a business. Macromedia Director is the premiere authoring software in the multimedia industry, allowing users to merge and orchestrate text, graphics, animation, video, sound effects, and music into business presentations, entertainment and education CD-ROMs, interactive information kiosks, and other full-featured interactive software. Multimedia-rich programs can be developed with little programming skill. (http://enternet.softseek.com/Review_28506_index.html) It supports different types file formats and you can combine images (BMP and PIC), sound (WAV), animation (GIF), text (RTF), and video content (FLC and FLI) into a single file and then export it in a variety of file types, including AVI and Shockwave. (http://enternet.softseek.com/Review_28506_index.html) Macromedia Director features a high-quality playback engine; visual effects, such as alpha channels, rotation, and skewing; support for vector illustrations; a scriptable programming language entitled Lingo; and much more. (http://enternet.softseek.com/Review_28506_index.html) Macromedia Director 6.5 lets you produce business presentations that sparkle with flavour, without giving you a scripting headache when you make them. Its goal is still to help novices quickly create multimedia animations, while letting advanced users produce eye-popping designs. At the heart of Director 6.5 is its Stage interface; you create interactive designs by dragging Cast Members--such as images and sounds--onto Scores, or series of frames in an animation. But Director 6.5 brings much more power to this virtual set. It's loaded with handy tools, and it works with all your favourite programs. To jazz up a PowerPoint file, simply import your slides into Director, and they're placed on a Score. Here, they're ready for sound, animation, and anything you want to add. (Jeff Walsh, 1998 v20 n20 p37(1) InfoWorld) Director 6.5 offers full Flash support, which makes it easy import and manipulate vector animations. There's also enhanced Windows support for QuickTime 3.0, allowing snappy digital video. What type of visual media will it let user incorporate? Macromedia Director allows many different types of visual media to be incorporated. I will explore four types of media and its capabilities and limitations Director provides.(Andre Persidsky 97 – Director 6.5) The four types are: Text Animation Bitmaps and Vector grathics Text Director supports three different types of text that you can incorporate in your movies. These are bitmapped text, Rich text and field. Each type has it advantages. A summary has been given below. Rich text (or otherwise known as simple text) is created using Directors text window, or with the text tool found on in the Tool palette. Of the three types, Rich text has the most extensive formatting controls.