Adobe Director 11 Tutorials
Distributing Movies / Streaming Director Movies
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Subtitles of the Movie (Adobe Director 11 / Distributing Movies / Streaming Director Movies)
Let me address in more detail this concept of streaming media content or streaming Director movies that I've mentioned previously in this tutorial. When you distribute a movie on the Internet streaming the file provides a more immediate and satisfying experience for your users. If streaming is not enabled users must wait for the entire movie to download before it begins to play, a streaming movie begins playing as soon as the specified amount of content reaches the users system. As the movie plays the remaining content downloads in the background and appears when its needed, streaming, you can imagine, can dramatically decrease the perceived download time because while the rest of the movie is downloading the user can be watching the first 10, 20 or 30 frames of your project. When Director streams a movie over the Internet it first downloads the Score data and other non-media information such as scripts and the size of each cast member's bounding rectangle. This data in contrast to your actual media data is quite small so its going to load very quickly, usually its only a few kilobytes before starting the movie, Director then downloads the internal and linked cast members that are required for the first frame of the movie or more frames if you've increased the number here in the Modify, Movie, Playback option, that brings up the Movie Playback Properties dialog and there's some very important settings in here that I want to cover but right now I'm talking about this streaming option right there, you want to enable play while downloading movie and then here you can specify the number of frames that Director must or in this case the browser must download before it starts to play. So if you had a lot of content in the first 20 frames or so, maybe there's a small animation playing between one and ten frames, 1 and 10, you probably want to download the first 10 frames so that opening animation plays smoothly. If you have a static screen in frame 1 where you want people to be reading information and they're going to stay they for awhile, probably better just to download that first frame before playing. So when that first frame downloads the user will be reading that content, meanwhile the browser, through this instruction here will be downloading the next two or three frames or more if the reader takes a long time to read that first frame. So after the movie starts Director will continue to download cast members along with any associated linked media in the background, loads cast members in the order that they appear in the scores, that's the key here, is if you have a score in which you have these graphics appear first, Director will download or instruct the browser to download those first. These Sprites over here will download much later since they're not needed until you reach or the user reaches frame 60 or so. Now if the user decides to jump back here to frame 70 and those cast members are not available yet because they haven't been downloaded to the browser the movie either ignores them or displays a placeholder, depending on how you set the streaming options back here in the Movie Playback Properties dialog box. You open that up again, modify movie playback, right here is a show placeholders option, you probably want to leave that enabled so that if the user does require some content that isn't downloaded yet at least they'll be a placeholder there and it won't be blank or the file won't actually crash and stop working. This is especially true if you're working with 3D objects, so the challenge of authoring for Internet streaming is making sure that all cast members have been downloaded when the movies calls for them, to avoid missing cast members, make sure that all the cast members required for a particular scene have been downloaded before beginning the scene. My advice is to use behaviors or Lingo scripting to instruct Director to wait for media in certain frames or to wait for particular cast members. Another technique is to control streaming movies by arranging Sprites in the Score and controlling the movement of the play head either with Director behaviors or with Lingo or JavaScript syntax. You can also use these scripting methods to specify when externally linked files are downloaded which you probably want to avoid is giving users the option to jump deep into your Director movie before those cast members have had a chance to load. That's one reason why I really like splash screens, opening screens that have minimal options and maybe some information to read to keep the user occupied while the rest of the Director movie is downloading and then limit your choices in that splash screen. Right now I have a choice of either going to the white section or the red wine section, this may be improved if its going to be distributed on the Internet by having just one enter button and having some information here maybe to keep the user occupied, perhaps reading information while the user is waiting the rest of the content is downloaded, then they click on the enter button and they get to another screen with more limited options giving Director even more time or in this case I should say the browser more time for downloading needed content. Then you may want to limit the options to places here early in the score so that the user can't link deep into the Score where your more likely to have cast members that are downloaded from the web server yet. So I wanted to take this opportunity to introduce you to this modify movie playback dialog, it's a very important one, most of your publishing settings however will be found here, File, Publish Settings, this is quite a deep dialog so I'm going to now go through several movies to explain the various settings in each of the tabs here in the Publish Settings dialog, formats, projectors, files, Shockwave, HTML and image. So let me now move onto the next movie and review the various settings here in the Publish Settings formats tab.
Tutorial Information
| Course: | Adobe Director 11 |
| Author: | James Gonzalez |
| SKU: | 33901 |
| ISBN: | 1-934743-84-4 |
| Release Date: | 2008-07-31 |
| Duration: | 9.5 hrs / 107 lessons |
| Work Files: |
Yes |
| Captions: | No |
| Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |
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