User Guide

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CHAPTER 12
Sound and Synchronization
You can give your movie added appeal by including a soundtrack, a voice-over, ambient noises, or
other sounds.
With Macromedia Director MX, 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.
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 do not adversely affect your movie’s performance.
Lingo 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,
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 on using video and QuickTime VR in Director, see “Using Video” on page 331.)
• Preload sound into memory, queue multiple sounds, and define precise loops.
• Precisely synchronize sound and animation.