Director 11.5 running on Windows 7. |
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| Developer(s) | Adobe Systems, formerly Macromedia |
| Stable release | 11.5 / March 23, 2009 |
| Operating system | Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows |
| Type | Multimedia Content Creator |
| License | Proprietary |
| Website | Adobe Director Homepage |
Adobe Director (formerly Macromedia Director) is a multimedia application authoring platform created by Macromedia—now part of Adobe Systems. It allows users to build applications built on a movie metaphor, with the user as the "director" of the movie. Originally designed for creating animation sequences, the addition of a scripting language called Lingo made it a popular choice for creating CD-ROMs and standalone kiosks and web content using Adobe Shockwave. Adobe Director supports both 2D and 3D multimedia projects.
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The differences between Director and Flash have been the subject of much discussion, especially in the Director development community. Extensibility is one of the main differences between the two, as are some of the sundry codecs that can be imported. Director has tended to be the larger of the two, but that footprint has been part of its weakness. This weakness manifest into the erosion of Director's ubiquity as the leader of authoring tools, especially in the critical window of 1998 - 2000. The download footprint of the Director Shockwave plugin was significantly larger than the Shockwave Flash download footprint. Additionally, Macromedia partnered with distributors such as Dell, Apple, etc. to have the Flash plugin pre-installed on machines for users, so that they would not be prompted to install any additional software. At that point in time (1998–2000), broadband internet access was not the norm for most users, and the fivefold difference in size was significant.
Director started out as MacroMind "VideoWorks", an application for the original Apple Macintosh. Animations were initially limited to the black and white of early Macintosh screens.
The name was changed to "Director" in 1987, with the addition of new capabilities and the Lingo scripting language in 1988. A Windows version was available in the early 1990s.
From 1995 to 1997 a competing multimedia authoring program appeared called mTropolis (from mFactory). In 1997 mTropolis was purchased and buried by Quark, Inc., who had its own plans into multimedia authoring with Quark Immedia.
The first Director release under the Adobe brand (v. 11) featured DirectX 9 and Unicode support and extended 3D capabilities based on the NVIDIA PhysX engine, as well as bitmap filters, enhanced video, audio and image file formats support, and Adobe Flash CS3 integration. Shockwave Player 11 was also released.
Version 11.5 added 5.1 channel surround sound audio capabilities, real-time mixing, audio effects and DSP filters. Also, there is added support for H.264-video integration for full-screen and high-definition playback. Other supported formats include: 3D importer for Google SketchUp, streaming support using RTMP and ByteArray datatypes.
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