Subtitles of the Movie

Let me now review how to use the Cast Window to work with cast members. Now, there are two different types of Cast windows, internal and external. Internal cast windows contain files that are internal and used exclusively in this particular movie. They're also a little bit easier to work with and manage and organize. External casts are useful for creating groups of commonly used cast members. Use external casts to switch large groups of cast members in a single step. For example, to switch the text cast members in your movie from an English version to a Spanish version you would simply switch the cast that the movie uses. You'd use a Spanish cast rather than changing each individual text cast member to its Spanish equivalent. You can also use external casts to keep your movie sizes smaller for downloading. This is because an external cast can be downloaded separately from the movie file if and when it's needed. And you can also view and set cast member properties using the Property Inspector. Notice that when you click on a particular cast member, the Property Inspector changes for that type of cast member. In this case it's a QuickTime movie so I have a member tab here where I can set meta data such as the Name, the File Name, the Location. I can also put comments and notes as well as tell Director when to unload this cast member from memory using normal procedures. The next possible moment, the last possible moment or never remove this cast member from memory. You also get a tab that's specific to that particular type of cast member. In this case I get a QuickTime tab where I have options for how I want Director to handle that video, such as include video and audio, pause the video at the start, loop it, stream it, add video controls and so on. Notice again, each time I click on a different kind of cast member, my Property Inspector changes. There's a member tab with common information, but then the tab that's unique to that tab, in this case a bitmap. Here I can change the JPG compression, quality compression and quality presentation of that graphic. Notice if I click on a sound cast member I get a Sount tab where I can loop it, play it, stop it, see the duration and the sample rate and the bit depth as well as whether it's mono or stereo. Before assembling a large number of cast members, it's always a good practice to create Cast windows that are necessary to keep them organized and then sort cast by type. You can edit cast properties and use external casts for storing and sharing common media elements. You can create as many casts as necessary in Director. The number of casts does not affect the size of the movie for downloading. In fact, you can include as many as 32,000 cast members in a single cast but it's usually best to group media such as text and buttons and images logically in a few different casts for each movie. To create these casts, what you'll want to do is select file, new, cast right there. Let's go ahead and name this, for example, music and I can store all of my music files in this cast. If I'm sharing those music files with other Director files, I probably want to go with an external option. Notice that you can keep creating all these casts to help you organize. Let's put pictures here. Helps you organize your project. Now, you can also find cast members. There's an excellent search tool in Director. You can search for cast members by name, type and color palette. You can search for selected cast members that are actually used in the Score. You can even delete or help you find cast members that are not used in any score. So you can delete them. You'll do your searching by choosing edit, find and then choose cast member. That'll bring up this very nice find cast member dialog. Notice you can search by name, type particular name in there. So let's search for that canyon graphic. Type the name and then click on select. Notice that it found it right there. You can also search by type. You can search just for bitmaps or film loops or palettes or sounds or buttons or shapes, transitions, text, OLE objects, vector shapes and so on, QuickTime, even Flash. They're very, very handy. So you'll need to use this when you have very, very large projects with hundreds of cast members. You can search by which palette the graphic is using. This last one is a very useful one. You can search by usage. These are not used in the Score and you can view by name or by number. This'll tell you. Notice that I haven't really built anything in my score yet so I have a lot of cast members here that are not used in the Score. And lastly, you want to use your Cast Window to help you organize your project by, notice you can name your Cast Window. So this might be a picture frame. You can write descriptive names. You can use spaces and capitals here. You can also use the Arrow tool in the Tools Panel to move around cast members within a specified Cast Window. So in other words, you can group all of your text elements together, all of your vector elements, all your pictures and your video, name them. It's very, very handy. It's like a little database that will really help you manage all the components, the cast members of your Director movies.