Subtitles of the Movie

In the previous movie I demonstrated how to create very precise frame-by-frame animations using step recording and also create animation by recording the movement of a Sprite as you drag it across the Stage. This is called real-time recording and it's especially useful for simulating the movements of objects or for quickly creating a complex motion that you'll later refine because remember, you'll be creating a motion path, much as you did with the step-by-step recording. As you drag your Sprite across the Stage and then you can go back later and really refine the path of that movement. For better control when you are recording in real-time, you'll want to use the tempo control in the Control Panel to record at a speed that is slower than normal. You can do that by reducing the frames per second setting here. The default is 30. Let me set that down to ten. Now, the Control Panel that's attached to the bottom of the Stage doesn't include this tempo setting here. Tempo settings are available only from the floating panel version of the Control Panel. So the way this works is you'll want to select one or more Sprites on the Stage or in the Score. Recording begins at the play head right here, so it's best to select a Sprite in the a channel that contains no other Sprites. Later in the movie, over here to the right, to record a specific range of frames, you'll want to select the frames and then click on the Selected Frames Only button in the Control Panel right here. So the way you can do that is CONTROL+ALT keys, press those down, then click out here to the right in the time line. If you're on the Macintosh, you'll hold down the option and the ALT key and click over here and then make sure that this button here in the Control Panel is clicked and on. Now it's in the off position. That's in the on position. If this is off and you haven't selected a range of frames, Director will continue adding frames for you as long as the animation is still continuing. To enable real-time recording with your Sprite selected, choose from the main menu control, real-time recording. You'll notice that there will be a different color bounding box around that Sprite. And the real-time recording indicator also appears next to the channel right there for the Sprite being recorded. So we'll get this red and white selection frame appears around the Sprite. That's a sure sign that you're in the real-time recording mode. Now, recording will begin as soon as you drag the Sprite on the Stage, so be prepared to move your mouse. What I'll do is I'll drag the Sprite on the Stage to record a path for the Sprite and Director will record that path pretty accurately too. The movie will continue to play until I stop it here using the Control Panel. What I'm going to do is I'm going to simulate a molecule bouncing around the four walls of my box here and if I go a little bit too far, it won't matter because I can always modify the path later. So no recording has started. It will start as soon as I move my Sprite. And the faster I move the Sprite, the faster the animation will appear. Notice as soon as I let go of my Sprite, Director plays the animation back. Let's go ahead and stop this and there is my path. You'll also notice that my animation ran beyond the length of my box. So what I would do now is go back and all the locations where I'm a little bit short of the edge of the box there, notice that right there I'm a little bit. You can also move the entire animation path there. But I can go back and notice right there, for example, I'm a little bit over extended, so I just move this, actually I just want to move the key frame, not the entire animation. But that's what I meant earlier when I mentioned that you can go back and refine the path after you've animated it. Somewhere in there I'm a little bit short. Something like that. You get the idea. You can create very complex animations very quickly using this real-time recording technique. That'll wrap up this section of the tutorial covering animation techniques in Director 11. In this section you've learned how to create frame-by-frame animations and tween animations. You've learned how to tween the paths of the Sprites, as well as how to accelerate and decelerate these Sprites once they've been tweened. You've learned how to switch a Sprite's cast member, how to use film loops and how to set film loop properties. We've also learned two interesting animation techniques; step recording where you can create very precise frame-by-frame animations and real-time recordings, where you create more complex animations that can then be refined a great deal by managing and manipulating the path of the Sprites created by this real-time recording. Let me now move on to the next section of the tutorial, one that covers color, how Director deals with color, how to work with a tempo channel and how to add transitions to your score.