Macromedia Director is the current industry standard multimedia authoring tool. It is optimized for media handling and interactivity and can produce results in a variety of formats. Director includes a powerful Object-Oriented scripting language called Lingo which can be used to make extremely sophisticated interactive designs.
Most commonly these days, Director is used to produce Director Shockwave movies for playback in web browsers. Director Shockwave movies are compressed multimedia documents which can include bitmap and vector graphics, animation, text, sound, digital video and QuickTime media. (The latter is a multimedia technolgy in itself and can also contain an equivalently large number of media types.) To see a suitable example of a Director Shockwave movie, click here. If you do not have the browser plug-in yet, your browser should take care of it for you.
Director Shockwave movies can only be produced with the proprietary Macromedia authoring tool, Director, currently at version 7. This tool produces documents which will playback on a variety of computer platforms, but the widest range of playback possibilities are available to 32 bit Microsoft Windows and PowerPC Apple Macintosh.
SMIL, (Synchronised Multimedia Integration Language) is a standard for multimedia description which has been developed by the World Wide Web Consortium. It is based on W3C's XML metalanguage, and as such is a text based format. Anybody with a text editor can produce a SMIL document which can be used to refer to images, sounds, texts and video files.
As we move towards an information based economy, the question of who owns the tools becomes increasingly important. Currently there are relatively few examples of tools for the creation of portable, digital multimedia documents. The time and resources necessary to develop such tools has meant that they are usually only available from larger software companies at more or less high prices. SMIL bucks the trend considerably. SMIL is an open standard and SMIL docuements can be produced and edited on any computer with an ASCII text editor.
Standards in the computer industry are not always taken seriously by large companies, there is often more money to be made from dominating the market with a proprietary format. In the long run, this slows development and inhibits cultural exchange. As a designer who is required to pay high prices for tools which are often incompatible with each other, I would like to support any initiatives to make multimedia design more freely avaiable.
It might seem a contradiction that I choose to do this with the most mainstream tool of all, Macromedia Director: I do this because I use Director anyway, because I think Director should be more open to and integrated with other multimedia technologies, and because I believe that a product can be produced with Director which can be more or less freely available for people to view, edit, convert and exchange SMIL documents.
The spirit of this project is a grass roots initiative, and as such, I will try to avoid becoming a mouthpiece for commercial promotion where possible. However, I must state that I do have 'more preferred' and 'less preffered' companies and technologies. It is my privalege as the site owner that I can decide which products to 'promote' and which ones to put down. To declare my allegiances immediately: I'm pro-Linux, hooked on BeOS but use a Mac in my actual media authoring work. I like QuickTime a lot. I'll therefore be paying more attention to these technologies. Plenty of other sites will represent other aspects of SMIL, such as Windows-only tools and players, RealNetworks and so on.
It should be obvious, but for those who have never read the wonderful Victorian children's book "Alice in Wonderland" by Lewis Carrol, the Cheshire Cat was able to vanish gradually from the tail forwards at will, except for his compulsive smile which would always remain visible. Lewis Carrol was, in reality Charles L. Dodgson a noted professor of logic. Many computer programmers got their first taste of boolean absurdity from the Alice books and still enjoy them today.
The project is conceived in three parts, which may or may not merge into one. Certainly, it is expected that technology will be shared between the three parts.
SMIL Import
This part of the project represents the creation of a tool which will allow Director users to import SMIL documents into the Director authoring environment for editing. The tool will almost certainly be a 'Tool Xtra', a plug-in component made with Director itself. Once a SMIL document is inside Director, it can then be exported in a number of other formats, such as a QuickTime movie.
Now that QuickTime itself supports SMIL, it could be that another approach is warranted. I have an example which works with QuickTime here. (If you have the QuickTime plugin installed, it should do the right thing).
SMIL Player
This part of the project will be the creation of a player application which will read and display SMIL documents in a non-editable form. It is hoped that the player will exist as both a standalone application and as a Director shockwave movie so that SMIL documents can be displayed in Web browsers.
SMIL Export
This part of the project will enable Director users to create SMIL documents with the Director authoring environment. The documents will be exported as a SMIL text and any linked media as external files.
So far, this is a one man effort. I am very keen to hear from any and all Director users or XML / SMIL enthusiasts who are interested in participating (in any way at all). I am doing this in my spare time, at it does not move particularly quickly. I am hoping that by keeping the project open, more people will become interested and make it their own. If you are not into Lingo, scripting or technical multimedia stuff, there is nothing here for you yet. Please do email me with any comments.
The latest version of the SMIL importer is SMIL003a. It can parse a SMIL document, import the appropriate media from relative URLs and lay them out in Director's score. Synchronisation and timing is my current sticking point because Director works in a frame-based rather than time-based metaphor. <switch> tags are currently ignored. Audio and video are shaky, but if you really need to get a SMIL document open somehow in Director, you could do worse than use it as is.
Please feel free to download the Director 7 document and try it out.
Type smil in the message window to initiate proceedings, then select the file ccat.smil.
NEW! SMIL editor
I have made an extremely basic Director7 movie which imports SMIL documents for editing (through the FileIO Xtra) and playback (through the QuickTime Xtra). Now we're getting somewhere. Download it here.
Going so soon? Well OK, then you'd better go somewhere relevant:
A good place to start, the place for news. An excellent all round resource.
From the horses mouth, a description of the format.
A good links page. (National Research Institute for Mathematics and Computer Science in the Netherlands)
A company producing a rather nice cross-platform SMIL editor and (freeware) player.
Produces Emilé, an XML editor for the Macintosh. The SMIL DTD is included as standard and a freeware "lite" version is also avaialable.