I'm trying to decide between buying Flash MX or Director. From reading the blurbs on the Macromedia website, I can't really tell the difference between the two.
That's a pretty good breakdown but remember that he's comparing Flash 5 and Director 7 - things have moved on a long way for both programs since then (Director has gone through 3 updates, Flash just one but a major one).
Flash has got a lot closer to Director in handling sound and video and Director has added a really powerful 3D engine.
One of the biggest factors in deciding between the two is where you want your material to appear - if it's the web then Flash is friendlier to your audience but down on power, if it's CD then Director is a way better option as download times and plug-in size are not an issue.
If you're coming into multimedia from programming then the supporting scripting languages are very different too - Lingo has a Visual Basic kind of feel whereas Flash Actionscript will feel more familiar if you're coming from Java/C/Javascript.
$500 is a good chunk of change for me, and I don't want to spend it buying a software package that might not be what I need.
I'm looking for something to do little "movies" and animation (like some of the stuff on atomfilms.com).
It would be net-oriented.
I wanted something flexible, and preferrably something that could handle making a product anywhere from 3 seconds to approximately 30 minutes in length.
I'd probably go with Flash in that case. I use both and try and pick the right one for each job - if you're doing net animation then Flash is ideal because it's good at handling vector images which look good on the web and typically make for small filesizes. The only potential drawback with Flash is that it's less stable than Director when using large files, so if you're intending to do a 30 minute movie which uses a lot of actual video content then it'll probably fall over. It should be fine with long animations though.
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