Hollywood Designer is the high-end WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) multimedia authoring system for AmigaOS and compatible operating systems. You can create amazing projects with just a few clicks, ranging from a simple presentation with slides to interactive applications, kiosk systems and games. You can also save your projects as stand-alone executables for AmigaOS 3, WarpOS, MorphOS, AmigaOS 4, AROS, Windows, macOS (Intel as well as PowerPC) and Linux (PowerPC, Intel, ARM). All data files and all fonts that your project uses can be automatically linked into this executable so that your whole project is stored in just a single program file which you can then distribute via the Internet or on a USB flash drive, for instance. Alternatively, projects can also be saved as AVI videos.
Hollywood Designer has everything you would expect from a modern multimedia authoring system: Many colorful icons, images and toolbars, extensive online help system, thumbnail view, undo/redo, context menus, recent menu, clipboard usage, keyboard control and a completely localized interface. It uses a slide-pased concept, which means that your project consists of as many slides as you want and each slide consists of as many objects as you want. Objects are for example texts, animations, brushes and autoforms. It has a powerful layout window where you can easily drag, scale and rotate all objects using the mouse. Everything is implemented in a WYSIWYG way.
The program supports bitmap, color, Intelli- and TrueType fonts for your texts. You can edit your text objects by using the powerful integrated text editor or you can import texts from external files into Hollywood Designer. Clipboard text import and export is also supported of course. There are many text formatting possibilities like bold, italic, underlined, shadow and outline text which can be used. Of course the shadow and outline style can be configured to fit your needs. You can also specify the text alignment (left, right, centered or justified). Automatic wordwrapping is supported by Hollywood Designer as well as the possibility to use anti-aliased text objects. You can also use the platform independent font engine which ensures that TrueType fonts look exactly the same on every system.
You can use brushes and animations to create absolutely unique projects. 24-bit transparency is supported for both types. You can also scale brushes to your desired size and you can rotate them. In addition you can use brushes that have an alpha channel. Hollywood Designer can insert many graphics forms into your projects like rectangles, ellipses, arcs, lines, polygons or one of the many pre-defined auto forms (arrows, bubbles, stars, explosions and many more!). Of course all objects can be freely scaled and rotated. You can configure the shadow and border settings, transparency, tint color, and the fill style for these objects as well as some other attributes like round edges for rectangles and line thickness. Anti-aliased drawing is fully supported on all systems. You can choose colors from a pre-defined palette of popular colors or you can mix your own colors in the powerful color manager. Hollywood Designer is a complete 24-bit application that can display every single color of the 16.7 million possible colors.
It is also possible to embed video clips in your project. These video clips can then be controlled using action events. For example, it is possible to start, stop, pause, resume, and seek video objects from action events.
Hollywood Designer supports Hollywood plugins as well. This makes it possible to use many new image, video and audio formats with Hollywood Designer or create real vector graphics if you have the appropriate Hollywood plugin installed.
Every object and every slide can be displayed with a transition effect. You can choose from a massive palette of over 150 different transition effects which are often very impressive. You can use cool fly-on effects for your objects like sine wave fly-on, curved fly-on or bounce fly-on. You can also remove your objects from the display with transition effects! An unlimited number of transition effects can run at the same time which can be used to create stunning projects. Furthermore, you can apply over 20 filter effects like blur, sharpen, grayscale, invert, solarize, and much more to all of your objects on the fly.
Hollywood Designer supports a global timeline which can be used to schedule the project of the single pages in every project. You can assign a timestamp in milliseconds to every page and Hollywood Designer will display it when exactly this time position has been reached. This is perfect for synchronizing a project to music, for example.
Hollywood Designer can play sound samples, streams, Protracker modules, and all other formats supported by Hollywood. You can modify the pitch value, volume, panning and loop settings of sound samples. Samples are loaded through datatypes so that you can use almost every format you want, 8 or 16-bit, mono or stereo. Hollywood Designer supports them all. MP3s are supported too, of course. Additionally full channel mixing is supported which means that you can play as many sounds as you want at the same time. And also Protracker modules can be played at the same time as sound samples. Audio support is implemented fully retargetable through AHI.
You can also use the program to create interactive projects, e.g. you can add menus to your project that query user input and react on it. This allows you to create complete multimedia applications like front-ends or disk magazines. Every object can be used as a button that monitors several events like mouse over, left mouse or right mouse click. You can connect all kinds of actions to events, e.g. show/hide other objects, play sounds, start programs, switch page, quit project, open URL and more. Over 50 different action events are supported!
Advanced users who are familiar with the Hollywood script language can also embed their own Hollywood code in the project. Every object and every page has the option to execute custom Hollywood code to make the project even more unique. Hollywood code can be easily edited within Hollywood Designer and there are many helpful tools like syntax checking, online reference and import/export of code.
With Hollywood Designer it is also extremely easy to create multilingual projects because all objects in a Hollywood Designer project can have multiple states depending on which language is currently active. This makes it very easy to maintain multiple languages in just a single project. It just doesn't get any easier!
Your project can be displayed in a window or on a full screen for a very refined look of your work! Hollywood Designer comes with an automatic scaling engine that can promote your project to any resolution you want. So even if you designed your project in 800x600 resolution, Hollywood Designer can still display it in e.g. 1920x1080 by automatically adapting all objects to this new resolution. All vector based objects like texts and forms will look perfectly crisp in the new resolution because they can be scaled without any quality loss! Hollywood Designer is just the ideal tool for all your multimedia needs on your Amiga or Pegasos.