Director Tutorial 12 - Publishing your movie

We need to package our movie so that our users can play it. We want people to be able to use our movie regardless of whether Director is installed on their system.

We will distribute our movie in two ways:

  1. By creating a projector for distribution by CD or DVD
  2. By creating a Shockwave movie for distribution over the internet

Projector

A Projector is a play-only version of a movie. Projectors play like any other movie on a computer, except the projector can;t be opened an edited.

Cross Platform?

To create a Director projector that runs on Windows and the Mac OS you must have access to machines running both operating systems. You must have Director installed on both machines and both machines must be running the same version of Director.

1. To create a projector choose File > Create Projector.

Figure 12.1: Create Projector

2. Find the director movie that you want to create a projector from.

3. Select the movie an click ADD.

4. Click OPTIONS, this opens the Project Options dialog box (see figure 12.2 below).

 

Figure 12.2: Projector Options

5. Select "Full Screen".

If you wish you can choose to compress you movie using Shockwave technology by selecting Compress (Shockwave Format from the Media option. This would result in a projector with a much smaller file size.

In addition, you could further reduce the file size of your projector by opting for a "Compressed" or "Shockwave" player.

6. Click OK to proceed with the projector creation process.

7. Click Create on the "Create Projector" dialog and enter a name for you projector in the "Save Projector As" dialog box.

Figure 12.3: Save Projector As

8. Click "Save" and you've created your projector!

 

Shockwave

Shockwave was developed by Macromedia to let developers prepare multimedia for the World Wide Web and allow Web users interact with a multimedia production once it's posted on the Web. Operating Systems, Web Browsers or other software Products may include Shockwave, or you can download it from the Macromedia Web site.

!. Open the movie that you'd like to "Shock"

2. Select Xtras > Shockwave for Audio Settings

Figure 12.4: Shockwave For Audio Settings

An Xtra is a utility program that adds additional features to Director. Director comes with several Xtras, including the Shockwave for Audio Setting Xtra. There are many more Xtras for third party developers.

Shockwave Audio is a technology that makes sounds smaller and plays them faster from a disk or over the internet.

3. Check the enabled box to enable compression for the audio embedded in the movie, then click OK to close the dialog box.

4. Choose File > Save as Shockwave Movie.

Figure 12.5: Save as Shockwave Movie

5. Choose a name for you movie.

6. Select "Create HTML" and "Open in Browser", this will embed your movie in a HTML page, open your default browser and play your movie.

In this tutorial you have learned how to:

  • create a stand alone projector for playback via a CD or DVD
  • shock a Director movie for playback over the internet
  • automatically embed a Shockwave movie in a Web page

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