On Mon, 16 Jun 2003 20:30:54 -0500 (CDT), [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > > I'm just curious, and would like to bounce the idea off of > someone more knowledgeable than myself (Colin?) -- would it be > possible (not by me, but by someone) to create a new QT Xtra > that director could feed multiple file information, layout, > timing etc (SMIL?) and generate a new QT file with all these > media embedded?
I know Tab replied to this. (Tab, if you've made some Xtras for exporting as QuickTime we want to hear about it!!!) Anyway, SMIL is a valid type for any app which supports QuickTime. It's trivial to make a SMIL editor in Director, and you can go a really long way with it beyond just having an editable field on stage, but essentially that's all you need to get going. The basics are: Create a well-formed string of SMIL (however you decide to do this) Write it to disk with fileIO Use qtMember.filename = "SMILdocument" to preview on stage This can be done rapidly enough to almost get realtime updating, although depending on how you are editing the SMIL source, you might not want to do that. You can download a sample movie which does this from here <http://brennan.young.net/Comp/Director/downloads/SMIL_edit.zip> In order to get it working you should have a very simple SMIL document (with media) on your disk. Click the import button, view the SMIL as multimedia, click the 'edit' button to change the source, click the 'save' button to preview it. VERY simple, but it could be much more fancy if you had an easy way of editing layouts, media links and sync times. Actually I don't know a better tool for making a SMIL editor. I wanted to make an OpenSource effort around this, but there was so little interest that I gave up. Someone made one with RealBasic and it is rather expensive for what it is. The step we are missing is to be able to convert to .MOV, but even if you did this, the external media would still be necessary. (SMIL is implemented in QuickTime using 'movie tracks' which are very similar to Director's LDMs). However, if you are running on a Mac you can use Applescript to perform some of these other steps. I can't remember what happens if you export a SMIL document as a flattened movie. It would be more interesting to be able to build QuickTime movies on a per track basis, but that would require considerably more work by someone with Xtra-writing ability. I would LOVE to have this, though. IMNSHO It's absolutely crazy that Director has QuickTime export functionality, but that this is not scriptable. With imaging lingo, it would be possible to make a fairly respectable AfterEffects-like application using Director if only they would open up the export Xtra. Brennan [To remove yourself from this list, or to change to digest mode, go to http://www.penworks.com/lingo-l.cgi To post messages to the list, email [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Problems, email [EMAIL PROTECTED]). Lingo-L is for learning and helping with programming Lingo. Thanks!]
