Director Tips

Here at Wheeler Multimedia we work with clients at many levels of production. Although most of our projects involve a producer, artists, programmers and an end client, these roles are fluid.

Are you an artist who also wants to act as the producer? Are you preparing assets to send to WMC? Would you like to co-program your project with WMC? Here are a few tips.

These recommendations are guidelines, and may not apply to all projects—your project may require different techniques. We are always available to help at any stage of the process. Happy Directoring!

Being your own producer

Interface design

Preparing your assets

Using your assets in Director

Being your own producer

Multimedia development = software development
Develop your project as a software project first and a graphic project second—major changes in the course of the project can be difficult and expensive to implement.

Step 1: Concept
Avoid feature creep! Figure out who your end user is, all the features your program needs, and what your minimum and preferred system requirements will be before you start the layout. System requirements let you plan for performance.

Screen 1: Intro

Transition background into logo animation sequence.
15 sec animation
Audio: “Zephyr.aif” looping

Screen 2: Main menu

Each topic wipes on
Rollovers on text, mousedowns on buttons.
Audio: Audio: “Gethappy.aif”, fades out in 10 sec
Buttons: products, services, company info, exit

Step 4: Gather your team, prepare assets
Arrange for artwork, audio, video, programming, and any other components of the final product. Find out the format the programmer requires for each kind of asset (see Preparing your assets below).

Step 5: Manage project progress
Monitor deliveries, set deadlines, arrange for testing, manage the client. Now it's all up to you!

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Interface design

Good design = easy to use
Follow these tips to create a program that is usable as well beautiful. If your average user has trouble understanding how to use the program, the problem is the program, not the user. Design around your user’s experience, skills and equipment.

• Keep it simple—crowded interfaces are difficult to understand and use.
  
• Graphics communicate functionality as well as content—use placement and design of interface controls and screen elements to tell the user where they are now, what they can do next, and how to do it. Consistency is the key to user understanding.
  
  For example, a single button might contain multiple visual cues about its function, such as color, icon and text label. Use multiple clues to make your interface easy to learn.
  
• Organize your functions to make intuitive sense—for example, “print” and “preview” buttons should be close to each other.
  
• Make on-screen text large enough—screen resolution is lower than print. Small print becomes fuzzy and hard to read.
  
• Make it easy—avoid requiring point-and-click acrobatics among controls scattered across the screen, or super-fine motor skills of any kind (unless it’s a game).
  
• Avoid requiring lots of reading—if the text has to scroll, it’s probably too long.

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Preparing your assets

Graphics:

• Design at the final screen size of your application, at 72 dpi, RGB. CD presentations are usually 800 x 600, but could be greater in an application environment such as a kiosk, where you can control the playback platform. Shockwave size varies and is generally smaller than full-screen.
  
• PC monitors have greater contrast than Mac monitors' usual setting. Avoid designs that appear very dark or very light overall on the Mac, since shadow and highlight detail may be lost on the PC. Test early in the design process by setting your Mac monitor gamma to 2.2 to approximate a PC screen. You can reset your gamma by choosing Calibrate in the monitor's color settings.
  
• Design in 32-bit, but keep in mind that we usually convert your graphics to 16-bit within Director. Large, subtly colored gradients may show some banding in 16-bit. Most people's monitors are set to display 16-bit color.
  
• Follow Windows naming conventions for naming files. Use extensions .psd, .pct, .mov, etc. This is just a good habit, since most applications are cross-platform or Windows-only. Although we do authoring and graphics processing on both platforms, we work mainly on PCs.
  
• Keep all graphic elements in layers in Photoshop. This will keep size and placement consistent, and make any changes much easier. If you create elements in Illustrator, bring them into a Photoshop layer when you are finished.
  
• If your buttons have several different visual states (rollover, mousedown, disabled), give each button its own Photoshop layer. Turn the visibility on and off to check for shifts in position.
  
• Render out each screen individually. Turn layers on and off in Photoshop to create each screen, and use save-a-copy to create picts. This allows us to place elements accurately, and makes sure each element is anti-aliased to the background. Please provide us with plain background screens as well. Also send us the original Photoshop file, just in case we need to make a change or re-export a screen.
  
• For best performance, export a screen for each of group of button states. Include the background to prevent a white fringe. Although we prefer not to, we could also use the Alphamania Xtra. Alphamania lets you import layers while preserving transparency, so the button can be placed against any background. However, since Alphamania members are 32-bit they may affect performance slightly.

Video:

• For CD playback on a Pentium 200, we would recommend limiting the pixel dimensions to 320 x 240, the data rate to 100K per second, and the frame rate to 15 frames per second with Sorenson compression. You can create a larger video with greater data rates if your minimum processor specification is greater.
  
• Stretching or shrinking the video in Director will effect performance, so create a version of the video at the size required.

Audio:

• We usually prefer to receive sounds with the following settings for a good compromise between sound quality and performance: Sample rate: 22.050 khz, Bit depth: 16 bits, Channels: mono.

Flash Assets:

• Flash assets are small in file size but processor intensive. It is best to avoid animating too many of them at once (particularly when using background transparent ink). You may be able to get better results for your Flash assets by animating several items in Flash and importing a single Flash (SWF) asset.
• Streaming Flash assets may interfere with reliable video playback. Avoid using streaming Flash animations simultaneously with video, which also streams.

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Using your assets in Director
These tips address a few recurring assets issues in Director. They reflect WMC's best practices. We hope they are helpful for your Director project.

Graphics:

• Convert 32-bit graphics to 16-bit after you have brought them into Director for better performance. Avoid-32 bit graphics and alpha channels unless you need the transparency, for example when masking an scrolling image with a soft-edged mask. You may also want to use the Alphamania Xtra for transparent members.
  
• For smaller file size, you may choose varying levels of jpeg compression in the Publish settings. Compression will take place only in a dcr or Shockwave projector.

Video:

Text:

• Text members have both vector based and bitmapped options. Vector based text, rendered from either a system font or an embedded font, contributes to a smaller file size. It is more processor intensive because the text is re-rendered every time it appears on stage.
  
• Text members with the Pre-Render and Save Bitmap options render the text using a saved bitmap. While the saved bitmaps increase file size, they also improve performance. This option cannot be used for editable text.
  
• To be sure the user will see the same font you have chosen, either 1) insert your font into a cast in Director, 2) use a font that all users will have, or 3) chose Pre-Render and Save Bitmap in the cast member properties. If the user doesn't have the correct font, then the program can still display the font you have chosen.

Sounds:

• If externally linked sounds are placed in a subdirectory, place an append the searchpaths command in the startmovie handler. See the video section for more detail.
  
• For Windows machines, the soundDevice default is to DirectSound when DirectX is present. If you are using QuickTime video, set the soundDevice to "QT3Mix" in your startMovie handler for smooth transfer of sound control between Director and QuickTime.

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