Subtitles of the Movie

In this section of the tutorial, I dig deeper into the Director cast members. Cast members are the media and other assets that comprise your movie. They can be bitmaps or vector shapes, text, scripts, sounds, Adobe Flash content or Flash components, DVD content. They can be QuickTime movies, Windows Media Video or audio, Shockwave Player 3D content, rich text from a word processor, sounds of various formats and much, much more. When you place a cast member on the Stage or in the Score, you create a Sprite. There's a little bit of a difference between cast members and Sprites. I'll be talking more about Sprites later in the tutorial. We'll use windows called Cast windows to group and organize your cast members. I have a Cast Window open here. To populate casts you'll import and create cast members. You can create and use multiple casts in a movie and you can group multiple Cast windows together in a tab Panel layout like I have here. I have two Cast windows. I can do another one by choosing file, new. Notice that two of my choices are movie or cast. Notice that there's also two types of Cast windows; internal or external. Internal are internal to this dir file and actually make the dir file bigger. Let's go ahead and type in a name for this. Call this Cast 2. Let's get rid of the caps there; cast 2. Let's make this an internal Cast Window and notice that now that's added to this tab selection. To populate this cast I simply choose file, import, then go to my hard drive here and grab some content. Let's grab a picture here to put into that Cast Window. You'll also notice that there are two views to this Cast Window. There's List View, which is the default, and Thumbnail View. Each has its own advantages and disadvantages I'll be covering in this section of the tutorial. I can also create and edit cast members in Director by using basic tools or media editors such as the Paint Window, the Text Window or even the Tool Panel here. If I open up my Stage, let's click on Cast Window number two. Let's go to the Stage here, move this out of the way and let's create some shapes. You'll notice that they are populated here in Cast Window number two. You can also use external editors, such as Photoshop, Fireworks, Adobe Addition and many, many more to edit and change your cast members. As I mentioned, you can also import cast members from almost every popular media format into a movie file. For some media types you can link cast members as external files located on a disk or the Internet. Linked cast members can be updated dynamically. As I mentioned previously, casts can be internal, such as I have here, this internal cast in my cast two, or they can be external, like my external Cast Window right here. This is in List View. So bring this back into Thumbnail View. These are stored outside the movie file and are available for sharing with other movies. That's a good way to share your casts. Let's say that you're working on a cartoon and there are three or four different animators, each with their own Director file. You can each share an external Cast Window or cast member in that Cast Window so that all the Director files share those assets. When you open the Cast Window, the Cast Window will be in List View by default. Let me now move on to the next movie and give you some details and techniques for working with the Cast Window to help you organize your cast members, how to change their properties, how to search for cast members and much, much more.