Re: using director

[Graham Quince] "We've got Director at work too, and i must admit i don't know what its for. The tutorials that we have all suggest building the menu in Flash and then exporting it to Director, which so far, because time is always tight, has seemed like a unneeded extra step. Director also has a bit of a learning curve attached to it.

So far i haven't found an answer to "what benefits does Director have over Flash?" Joel, seems like you've found one. Can you say a bit more?

Graham"

hello graham, sorry it's taken me a while to respond. i agree that director does have quite a steep learning curve, but that's only because it has that much more horsepower under the hood. i'm not an expert on it by any means, but i've found that it's much more robust in playing back media files for cd/dvd distribution. for example, in the project i was having trouble with, i was trying to play back flash video files from within different flash scenes. some of these files were a couple minutes long, and when trying to work on them in a flash timeline, the timeline itself had to be equal to however many frames the video file contained. this made zooming and navigating the longer timelines somewhat of a chore.

however, in director i was able to use swf files instead of flv files (which were smaller in size and cleaner), i could put everything into one timeline or "movie," and i only needed to allot a few frames of timeline space to each former flash "scene" because you can set a flash sprite to play back on the same frame until it's finished, and still control it with buttons! so when all was said and done, it only took me a day to reconstruct in director what the ad agency had worked on for weeks in flash.

so for smaller, web-based animation and interaction? flash without a doubt.
for larger, media file distribution and interaction? director almost every time.

hope this helps!

joel