User Guide

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CHAPTER 10
Sound and Synchronization
You can give your movie added appeal by including a sound track, a voice-over, ambient noises, or
other sounds.
With Macromedia Director MX 2004, you can control when sounds start and stop, how long
they last, their quality and volume, and several other effects. Using Macromedia Shockwave
Audio, you can compress sounds for easier distribution and stream them from an Internet source.
You can also incorporate Windows Media Audio (WMA) in your Director movies.
The media synchronization features in Director let you synchronize events in a movie to precise
cue points embedded in sound.
Sound makes significant demands on a computer’s processing power, so you might need to
manage sounds carefully to make sure they don’t adversely affect your movie’s performance.
Scripting gives Director more flexibility when playing sound and can help overcome performance
concerns. You can use it to play sound in ways not possible with the Score alone. Using Lingo or
JavaScript syntax, you can do the following:
• Turn sound on and off in response to movie events.
• Control sound volume.
• Control the pan of a sound relative to the pan of a QuickTime VR movie. (For more
information about using video and QuickTime VR in Director, see “Using Digital Video”
on page 243.)
• Control the sound in a Windows Media Audio file.
• Preload sound into memory, queue multiple sounds, and define precise loops.
• Synchronize sound and animation precisely.
Importing internal and linked sounds
Director handles sounds as either internal or linked. You can determine whether a sound is
internal or linked when you import it. Each type of sound has advantages for different situations.
Director stores all the sound data for an internal sound cast member in a movie or cast file and
loads the sound completely into RAM before playing it. After an internal sound is loaded, it plays
very quickly. This makes internal sound best for short sounds, such as beeps or clicks, that recur
frequently in your movie. For the same reason, making a large sound file an internal sound is not
a good choice because the sound might use too much memory.