Director^® now lets you add visual interest and unusual animation to movies or Internet banners using minimum storage. With the Distort Effect Xtra^™ add-in, you can create a rich set of animations that make an image appear waving as a flag, reflected in a pond, blurred as though underwater, and similar techniques. These animations can be played back in Director, in Shockwave^™, or in a stand-alone projector. The Distort Effect Xtra offers a choice of eight animated effects:

pond	flag wave
reflection	fun house mirror
rolling sea	ghost
underwater	effect4

One of two Intel^® Web Design Effects available with Director, the Distort Effect Xtra provides low-storage image animation. No animated GIFs are required since the animation is procedurally generated, greatly reducing storage and run-time memory requirements. Mathematical equations operate on just a single bitmap, altering individual pixels to create realistic animation. Equivalent quality GIFs would be huge. The Shockwave run-time Xtra enables low-bandwidth image animation, since only a few key parameters must be transmitted down the wire. Since the host processor performs the calculations, no burden is put on the connection.

Using the Distort Effect Xtra, you can create animated distort effects—either stand-alone effects or effects applied to another image. If you choose to apply image animation to another image, you can use any bitmap source in any Director cast as an image in the animation. In a dialog box, you simply select a bitmap from a cast and apply the effect to a chosen mask color. Director inserts the result into your cast, where it can be dragged to the stage or score, and played back in a movie. You can scale and position the image as necessary. The Xtra also provides control over properties in Lingo^™ scripts.

For more information

For information about known issues, refer to the readme file. For information about support, consult the Macromedia^® Director 7 Help.