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Chapter 11: Sound and Synchronization
Give your movie added appeal by including a sound track, a voice-over, ambient noises, or other sounds.
®
®
With Adobe
Director
, you can control when sounds start and stop, how long they last, their quality and volume,
and several other effects. Using Shockwave® Audio (SWA), 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. 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. 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.
•
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 isn't a good choice because the sound might use too much memory.
Director doesn't store sound data in a linked sound cast member. Instead, it keeps a reference to a sound file's location
and imports the sound data each time the sound begins playing. Because the sound is never entirely loaded into
RAM, the movie uses memory more efficiently.
Because Director streams many sounds, it begins playing the sound while the rest of the sound continues to load
from its source, whether on disk or over the Internet. This can dramatically improve the downloading performance
of large sounds. Linked sounds are best for longer sounds such as voice-overs or nonrepeating music.
Director can stream the following sounds:
•
QuickTime, Shockwave Audio, and MP3 sounds that are linked from a URL
•
QuickTime, Shockwave Audio, MP3, AIFF, and WAV sounds that are linked to a local file
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