First impression: running Director on Intel iMac
March 8th, 2006
A few weeks back I got to play with Shockwave on one of the new Intel iMacs running under Rosetta. It had a rather snappy feel, and for the content I typically create it was more than adequate.
The downside was that the screen had a rather large defect near the bottom, so it immediately got sent back to Apple for a new one. Eventually it made it back. Today I confirmed that once again the Shockwave is snappy. Then I decided to take a shot at seeing how Director felt.
One word: SLOW. I didn’t get to play with it for very long. Basic tasks such as dragging sprite around, editing scripts, naming members, etc. seemed to run at a decent pace, but hitting the play button to test the movie was really painful. It would typically sit there for about 3 seconds before doing much in a movie that had nothing in it other than a text member and a go to the frame statement in it.
In defense of Director I will point out that the iMac I was using only had the base 512 meg of RAM. Director has always been a bit RAM hungry (as are most all multimedia tools), and combine that with OSX 10.4 itself and Rosetta and it makes sense that the poor iMac would feel pain. I think I also had Safari (in Rosetta) running in the background.
If I get a chance I’ll try to watch RAM usage next time I boot up Director on it. Right now it is primarily a testing machine for the content I work on. It would also be nice to see how it would do if the RAM was maxed out.
I’ll probably be buying a new iMac for home in the near future, but will get the full RAM. I’ll let you know how that goes when I finally get my taxes done to see if I get the new computer this year. No matter what, I’ll then be living with Director in Rosetta at home.
For additional info, here is another story from Developer Dispatch on the new Intel Macs that got posted earlier today.
Entry Filed under: Daily thoughts,Mac to Intel
4 Comments Add your own
1. Aldo Hoeben | March 1st, 2006 at 6:45 am
It does seem like ‘the end is neigh’. Leather iPod pouch, and a green power led on the mac mini?
2. Mark Andrade | March 9th, 2006 at 2:09 pm
I’ve found Director MX to be pretty decent under Rosetta. Better than my G4 iMac. I have not tried MX 04 though. The files I tested with weren’t huge. They were about 4 to 6 MB in size. Director was the only app running too.
3. MultimediaGuy | March 9th, 2006 at 10:19 pm
I’ll definitely have to toy around a bit more when I get a chance. Pressing rewind/play definitely seemed to be the slowest thing, but everything else seemed decent.
The fact that it seems to run without any problems is good all by itself. If Adobe (aka Macromedia) at least gets a universal version of the Shockwave plug-in and a way to create universal projectors that will do a lot to move forward.
4. Daniel bullock | April 21st, 2006 at 6:17 am
i have to an intel macbook pro and i cnt seem to get director mx 2004 working on it, there isnt an option to open under rosetta i really dont no what to try now
Leave a Comment
Some HTML allowed:
<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>
Trackback this post | Subscribe to the comments via RSS Feed