Alternatives to Macromedia Director - QT based?

Question

Alternatives to Macromedia Director - QT based?

As you may know, Director is a creaky 15 year old program that has major performance issues -- mostly due to no multi-processor/multi-core support, no Intel Mac support, poor Quicktime sync with other animated objects, and no long file-name support.

I make screens that are made of several sets of intricate looped animation (usually PNG sequences and QT movies) that are triggered by certain keystrokes. They never contain any audio.

All of the examples I've seen produced with LiveStage Pro allow full interactivity like for kiosks and presentations. The projects I build usually do not need such full interactivty.

Can LiveStage Pro do the things I'm looking are looking for? Are there other Quicktime based interactive authoring programs? I need to make keyframed basic geometric animation (position, scale, rotation, opacity), embedded Quicktime and PNG-sequence playback, better support for modern CPUs, basic scripting (jump to a looping animation sequence and repeat the loop until another key is pressed where the project will jump to another looping sequence). It would also be great that all refereced media was self-contained into one file (and not need to reference any external files - like Quicktime movies).

iMac G5 2GHz 20", Mac OS X (10.4.8)

Posted on Oct 24, 2006 11:02 AM

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Answer 1

Oct 26, 2006 9:16 PM in response to Navarro Parker -

I think you're misleading people about Director by saying it's a creaky 15 year old program. For a start, it's 18 years old.

QuickTime is handled by the system, and may well use the second processor (I'll check sometime), and many people are reporting better than G4 performance in Director using Intel machines and Rosetta. I'll know for sure about that in a week or two when my new MacBook Pro arrives! Director is also still under development, with Adobe already apparently asking developers what features they'd like in the next couple of releases.

Could you not do everything you want to do using Director, without involving QuickTime? Would it be possible to see an existing piece that you did, for me to try and replicate the effect with a combination of Director and QuickTime?

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Answer 2

Oct 31, 2006 9:34 AM in response to Colin Holgate

Hi Colin! Thanks for your reply. Your correction about Director's age made me laugh!

Unfortunately, the projects I'm working on are under NDA. But I can say they usually involve replicating a computer interface at hi-def resolution. They are sets of pre-scripted animation sequences that are activated by a single keystroke. So there are usually 20 or more tiny looping objects per segment. That entire segment loops until a keypress jumps to another segment with another 20 looping objects.

And I'm just looking for something more modern and efficient.

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Answer 3

Nov 1, 2006 8:18 AM in response to Navarro Parker -

Director is often the best tool for the job, and Adobe are working on a Director 11 release for the first half of 2007. Why not stick with it?

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