Director is alive! RIP Director!

My old AD chatted me up to lemme know that Adobe recently released Director 11. Back in the day we used Director alot. Not only was it a game publishing platform but a great production tool we used to do 2d animation, art production work and heck even to write xml! It kicked the shit outta flash which always suffered from poor performance. We all assumed Director was dead and buried but it has recently risen from the grave as Director 11! Um now when I say risen I really mean more like a crawling out decaying zombie. Night of the Living Dead zombie, not jesus zombie.

I’m not sure where to even begin. I haven’t kicked the tires all that much but lemme just fly loose with my poorly researched assumptions.  For one it still requires a Director shockwave plugin for which there aren’t any for intel macs (you gotta use the rosetta workaround). The new features are sad for a release after so many years and it’s still costly at one thousand USDs! They’ve added new file formats for import but this kinda support is hardly a feature especially for Flash support which should be a given. What else…unicode…physics engine…whoopee!

Opening up Director again after almost a year i forgot how much i loved the interface. Flash’s interface makes no sense to animators and no sense to programmers. Neither like to use it so who is it catering to? I learned animation by using Director. Having a decent onion skin tool and real-time updating takes the technical limitations out of the equation and allows for quicker creative growth. In Flash you gotta almost unlearn animation to navigate it’s clumsy interface. I wish they would just finally smash together Director and Flash and bring their pros together. I’m sure that’s alchemy but a boy can dream.

I dunno what Adobe’s doing with Director. I wish they would just kill it or overhaul it. They should have released this a week later, it would have been more appropriate.