MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX-USING DIRECTOR MX, Use Manual

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CHAPTER 11
Using Flash and Other Interactive
Media Types
To add complex media and new capabilities to your Macromedia Director MX movie, you can
use Macromedia Flash movies, other Director movies, and ActiveX controls. Each of these
multimedia formats has interactive capabilities that are preserved by Director.
A Flash movie in a Director movie provides a vector-based, scalable, interactive animation that is
optimized for use on the web.
Director movies within other Director movies simplify complex productions. A linked movie
appears within another movie as a single cast member, saving you the trouble of managing extra
cast members and Score data. Using discrete movies also helps you manage file size for easier
downloading.
ActiveX controls in Director can manage ActiveX application resources from within a movie.
ActiveX controls provide a variety of features, including web browsing, spreadsheet functions, and
database management. ActiveX controls function as normal sprites in a movie. ActiveX controls
work only in Director for Windows and only in projectors.
Using Flash Movies
You can incorporate Flash vector-based animation in your Director movies, projectors, and
Macromedia Shockwave movies for the web simply by importing a Flash movie into Director and
using it like any other cast member. Effects that once required multiple versions of a bitmap cast
member—such as blending one shape into another—can now be accomplished with a single,
small Flash movie.
Director can import Flash 2 files or later. It supports the new features of Macromedia Flash MX,
including access to Flash Communication Server MX.
In Director, you can control nearly every Flash movie property—including playing, rewinding,
and stepping forward and backward through any Flash movie, adjusting quality settings, and
turning sound on or off—using Lingo commands.
In Flash, you can create cross-platform Windows and Macintosh movies and then play or
manipulate them in Director. You can create Flash movies that communicate with your Director
movie by sending events that Director scripts can capture and process. You can store entire Flash
movies in the Director cast file, or you can link to external Flash movies. Director automatically
loads the Flash movie it encounters in the Score into memory from disk, from a network drive, or
from anywhere on the Internet.