Veerle's blog

Director has always been a bit of a low profile kid of Macromedia and now with Adobe buying Macromedia its future isn’t secure. Some even think that Director (the product that shaped Macromedia) is a possible candidate to get axed. But here at Duoh! we still are using it. And why not, it is the best tool for producing media rich CD-ROMS.

One of our latest projects in Director was a CD-ROM for Compex a company that now operates under the Siemens wings. The project was called the Compex chronicle 1985-2001. From the start it was clear that this would be a super fun project. The first challenge revealed itself when our clients dropped off around 30 or 40 photo albums full of pictures to be scanned. In all the years of work we never used the scanner that much ;-)

The project was built around historical events throughout the company’s history, so it seemed only natural to represent everything in a timeline. That’s when the idea of a timeline that reacts to mouse movement came to life. When you move the mouse over a date a little box appears with a thumbnail. There are two ways to view the pictures, a manual and slide show mode (with control over the speed). Also on the CD-ROM are movies from for example a TV show that was filmed at the Compex headquarters. These movies had be to converted from VHS to a digital format and optimized by using a codec to get the file size reasonable and playable on older computers. For other challenges I’ll switch you over to our Director master Sven:

The challenge mainly existed out of 2 parts: the first one was how to integrate the different media like, QuickTime movies, jpg’s, pdf’s, ... without opening an external player and secondly, find a way to quickly integrate the media to the timeline. (also handy for future corrections/adjustments)

As for the integration of the media, movies and images were no problem. Only for pdf’s an external player was opened: Acrobat Reader. To solve this problem, and still maintain the functions Acrobat offers we decided to buy Integration New Media’s Impressario extra. So, now Director was equiped with the Acrobat engine, allowing us to embed pdf’s on the stage…

Secondly we started writing a little text-based database allowing the date, file and information to be linked to the timeline. This came in especially handy when receiving last-minute corrections from the client.

So now you have a bit of an insight into a new media project as it grows. More screen dumps can be found in our portfolio and on this special page with full size examples.

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