Director Diaries

Some years ago, I worked on a project, in which Director was used in a specific way – whole animation scenes were fitted and after that the .dir files were used for Bink video files. So, we had to work with big scores – 50 channels, 300 – 400 frames. This provoked a lot of tasks which demanded automation. ScoreCommander is a “remastered” compilation of all those automating scripts plus some other that were added later on different occasions. I think that some of the functions could find a wider application than the original occasions that provoked their creation. Others could probably be used as a basis or inspiration for writing better ones. So, what is ScoreCommander?

ScoreCommander is an easy to use Adobe Director tool xtra that gives you a number of efficient functions, which will ease the work process for you. For the sake of convenience, they are arranged in four pages — Frames, Sprites, Members and Export.

The Frames page includes functions, which will help you to create, rename and delete markers; to insert and delete frames; to select frames; to export marker lists.

The Sprites page gives you useful functions, which will ease your work with score selections. They allow you to select sprites by different indications, to save and manipulate selections; to create, resize and automatically distribute sprites.

The Members page is connected with cast selections, finding castmembers by different indications and “optimizing” the score by the exchange of visually identical castmembers.

The Export page gives you the possibility to compose and export certain frames or sequences of frames from Director, as well as castmembers or sequences of castmembers.

AlphaComposer allows you to export the image of stage on a frame or frames as 32-bit images with alpha-channels, which reflects the alpha-channels of sprites’ members, the sprites’ blend and the effects of the sprites’ transparences on each other on the stage. The final RGB+Alpha image can be used on different backgrounds. To work with this page, you need SharpExport xtra.

The documentation can be seen on here. (It also can be found in the download archive, in .chm format.)

INSTALLATION:
1.Download and extract “Scommander.zip” — it contains a folder named “Scommander” and a file named “SharpExport.x32“
2.Quit Director
3.Copy the “SharpExport.x32” file into the Xtras folder of Director
4.Copy the “Scommander” folder into the Xtras folder of Director
5.Launch Director
6.From the Xtras menu, choose “SCommander > SCommander”

Score Commander ( 23 )