Once there was a time when the name Director was the one uttered by all aspiring producers of multimedia. (Well, almost all.) In the days of the CD-ROM it reigned supreme. Then the Web began and Flash appeared and became a force to be reckoned with.
      Many converts and newbies appeared all across the lands. With time, they came to better understand Flash and its ActionScript and vectors, and shared that knowledge with all who asked for it, and pushed the edge of the envelope and it was good.
      Then they began to champ at the bit for even more control of bitmaps, and sounds and imported Quicktime movies, and pined for real 3D instead of the stuff that was really 2D stretched to 2.5D. The techies of Macromedia heard the plaintive cries of the people, and lo, Director 8.5 arose in the wilderness and gave them all the things they desired.
      And then the learning curve reared its ugly head.

The Reality
Director was never the easiest application to learn to use, and it was even harder to learn to use it well.
      Its strength, besides its capacity for combining movies, animations, interactivity, sound loops and effects, vectors and bitmap graphics into one well-integrated whole, is in its scripting language, Lingo. Before Flash 5 came along and threw a bucket of cold water on to designers’ natural aversion to anything smacking of programming, Lingo loomed tall and threatening. Designers had to team up with programmers to achieve moderately ambitious results.
      That was until recently, however. Director version 8.0 added Behaviors, readymade Lingo combinations that you apply to your movie elements through drag-and-drop. Director 8.5 added true 3D and a stack of new Lingo Commands, and Behaviours.
      Behaviours are the biggest aid in reducing the slope of Director’s traditionally steep learning curve. This book, Foundation Director 8.5, is the second largest.

This Book
Foundation Director 8.5, in common with all of Friends of ED’s Foundation series, is designed as a book-length tutorial. You will get the best out of it by working through each chapter in succession. At the end you will have touched on all the fundamental aspects of Director 8.5, especially Lingo and 3D, and you will have enough grounding in it to create your own smaller projects, or you can go on to the next in the series, Director 8.5 Studio.
      The authorial team Friends of ED have assembled for Foundation Director 8.5 is a good one. There are even two Australians amongst the six—Dean Utian and Luke Wigley. The others have plenty of experience working with Director commercially, and in teaching it in colleges and user groups.
      That experience shows. They ease into Lingo quickly and organically, instead if leaving it to the end of the book as if it was too difficult to contemplate until then. Their easy-to-read writing style and clear presentation makes Director seem like it is not difficult to pick up at all.

The Program
There is no doubt that Flash is going to be the first choice for web multimedia projects for quite some time to come. It has the numbers, in terms of installed copies of the plug-in, and it has small download size on its side. Director does not.
      What Director does badly is what Flash still does badly or not at all—handle imported bitmaps without smearing the edges, hurl bitmaps around the stage with aplomb, give you endless control over sound, import and integrate Quicktime as easily as exporting to it, and include real 3D. Director exports to Shockwave files for use on the web, or Macintosh or Windows projectors for local playback.
      3D on the web became a minor issue when MetaCreations morphed into MetaStream and then ViewPoint, with its sole product being a 3D web browser plug-in for e-commerce sites. The plug-in was a good product but contained too many barriers to its widespread adoption. Intel partnered with ViewPoint on their plug-in, then pulled the plug and did a deal with Macromedia instead.
      That move is to our advantage and the public’s. Macromedia is firmly committed to crossplatform parity, mostly, and releases Mac and Windows versions of its plug-ins and applications simultaneously. Their new relationship with Intel has not affected that.
      The Shockwave 8.5 plug-in continues to be large, with limited distribution compared to Flash, but it is for more than just 3D. There is more incentive for people to download it than a 3D-only plug-in.
      The other incentive is in the gradual adoption of broadband worldwide. If the forces of supply and demand ensure that enough people are able to buy enough broader bandwidth then Shockwave will find a bigger user base in due course.

The Book:

• Title: Foundation Director 8.5
• Authors: Dean Utian, Sam Humphries, Charles Parcell, Jose Rodriguez, Chuck Wainman II, Luke Wigley
• Publisher: Friends of ED
• Publication Year: 2001
• Pages: 438
• Illustrations: Monochrome
• ISBN: 1903450381
• Rating: 4

• Introducing Director
• Introducing Animation
• Creating Animation
• Starting Scripting
• Movie Matters
• Sound
• More Scripting!
• Controlling Media with Lingo
• Planning
• Distributing Your Movies
• Testing and Debugging
• Beginning 3D
• Resources