From: sakelley@euclid.ucsd.edu (Scott Kelley)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac.programmer
Subject: Re: QuickTime, Director, Closing Windows
Date: 10 Sep 92 17:52:07 GMT

In article <1992Sep10.173941.10737@waikato.ac.nz>, ldo@waikato.ac.nz (Lawrence D'Oliveiro, Waikato University) writes:
> In article <37864@sdcc12.ucsd.edu>, sakelley@euclid.ucsd.edu (Scott Kelley) writes:
> > I'm working on a large multimedia project with MacroMind Director. Since
> > Director's QuickTime support leaves something to be desired (it's buggy)
> 
> Uh-oh. And here I was looking forward to my 3.1 upgrade... :-{

Yes, there are a number of bugs in Director 3.1, but we haven't been
bitten by them enough times to have them well defined yet. There's some
kind of problem with printing a frame of the stage that has a QuickTime
castmember on it (it consistently dropped me into MacsBug when I tried
it) and there are also some strange things about Palettes when using two
monitors, and some strange things about Palettes and QuickTime movies
that are being dithered by QuickTime down to 8 bits. But, all in all,
the bugs in Director 3.0 were worse (like the
destroy-a-bitmap-as-you-scroll-it-in-the-paint-window bug and, my
personal favorite, the "save as"-destroys-original-file bug.)

> >   My XObject is very simple: It gets two numbers and a string as
> > parameters, opens the movie filename found in the string, and plays it
> > with the upper left corner in the coordinates specified. So far so good.
> >   Problem: When I call CloseWindow to dispose of the window after I've
> > played the movie, QuickDraw erases the region that had the movie in it,
> > and puts a white rectangle there instead.
> 
> Did you actually open your own window, rather than playing the movie in
> Director's stage window? Does the latter not work? It's just that I've seen
> an example Director movie which did exactly this, using the Apple/Claris
> QTMovie external. Even worked with Director 2.0.1, too.

Gee, actually that never occurred to me. I was following Apple's sample
code, and THEY opened a window, so I did too. I'll try doing it without
opening a window and see what happens. I'll let you know...

I never tried using the QTMovie externals... I only tried the QTPict
ones for JPEG, and I couldn't get it to work...

> If you really have to open your own window, I guess one thing to try is
> save the bits behind it, and restore them after closing the window. Director
> will still get an update event and redraw that area, but this is probably
> not worth worrying about.

Actually, I started out worrying most about JPEG images, since our
project has a lot of scanned slides, and we'd like to have people with
high bit depth monitors (16bit or better) see the images in full color.
Plus the JPEG compressed 24-bit images are about the same size as the
8-bit images as castmembers. We can bring up JPEG pictures by doing a
link to a pict file, but unfortunately director always stores HARD links
(i.e. full pathnames) and so it can't find the images when we install
our software on other machines. And we don't want the user to get that
"please find this file..." dialog! Why can't Director use the alias
manager? Or do you know some way of making "link to file" work more
flexibly?

> Lawrence D'Oliveiro                       fone: +64-7-856-2889
> Computer Services Dept                     fax: +64-7-838-4066
> University of Waikato            electric mail: ldo@waikato.ac.nz
> Hamilton, New Zealand    37^ 47' 26" S, 175^ 19' 7" E, GMT+12:00

Thanks for the suggestions. I'll try them today and let you know how it
goes...

Scott

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Scott Kelley, sakelley@ucsd.edu, (619) 534-8560
Multimedia Interactive Learning Laboratory (MILL)
Department of Biology, UC San Diego
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