Subtitles of the Movie

Let's now turn our attention to bitmap cast members. Bitmaps and vector shapes are the two main types of graphics used with Director. A bitmap defines an image as a grid of colored pixels. If you open up the Paint Window, by double clicking any bitmap, either on the Stage or in the Score and then you zoom in, way as far in as you can, you'll notice all of these squares here, referred to as pixels. Now, in contrast, a vector shape is a mathematical description of a geometric form that includes the thickness of the line, the fill color and additional features of the line that can be expressed mathematically. You can see vectors and contrast them to your bitmaps by opening up the Vector Shape window. Notice if I go in here and take the Pen tool and create a shape with either the Pen tool or perhaps one of the vector shape tools here, you'll see that if I zoom in, you won't see those pixels in there. This is a mathematically expressed or mathematically defined shape. Now, bitmaps are better suited for continuous tone images such as photographs. Vectors are probably better suited for text and simple shapes and diagrams. Let's go ahead and close the vector shape and paint window. You can easily make minute changes to bitmap by editing those single pixels but resizing the image can cause distortion as the pixels are redistributed. Anti-aliasing is a Director feature that blends the bitmaps colors with background colors around the edges to make the edges appear smooth instead of jagged. You'll see this very well demonstrated whenever you look at text. If we zoom in to my Stage, you'll see very clearly some anti-aliasing along the edges of that curved text. Notice that it's changing from this dark brown to a lighter gray-brown and then it fades into this kind of off-white color. So that's anti-aliasing and it's designed to smooth out those jaggies that you see. If we zoom back out, notice that that now looks smooth at a hundred percent. You can create bitmaps in the Paint Window if you want to create them right in Director or you can import them from image editors such as Photoshop or Fireworks in most of the popular formats including GIF, JPG, PICT files and PSD files. If you want to create your own bitmaps, you'll use the Paint Window. Let's click on the Paint Window icon here and bring up the Paint Window. Click on the plus icon in the upper left-hand corner to create a new canvas. And then use the various tools here. Now, these shape tools look very similar to the shape tools in the Vector Shape window but they're actually bitmaps that I'm creating here. And you'll notice that if I zoom in, especially on the curved edges, you'll see these pixels and that stair stepping. Notice that this particular shape is not anti-aliased. Now, you can also import bitmaps with alpha channel or transparency data, as well as animated GIFs. The Paint Window includes a variety of tools for editing and applying effects to these bitmaps but it's really not as useful as it looks. You probably want to do most of your image editing in Photoshop or Fireworks and then import those images into Director. Bitmap, I should point out, typically requires more RAM and disk space that a comparable vector shape. If not compressed, bitmaps take longer than vector shapes to download from the Internet. However, Director offers compression control to reduce the size of bitmaps in movies that you package to play on the web. Probably the best place to do that is to open up the Cast Window. I have here those bitmaps that I just created and then choose from the main menu Modify, transform bitmap at the bottom of that menu and you can see here you can reduce the color depth from 32 bits, which is default for this file, down to 16 which is generally what I do. Thirty-two bit is best if you have alpha channel transparencies, but once you create a transparency, you don't really need that extra 16 bits so I usually drop it down to 16 or perhaps even eight bit. In this case I have simple colors so I can probably very safely move that down to eight bit. Director warns me that I can not undo this operation. Do I want to transform? Click OK. This image is now eight bit, so it's three times smaller than the original and it probably doesn't look any worse for wear. Probably can't tell any difference between this image, which is now eight bit and the 32-bit original. Now, importing bitmaps is actually one of the more important techniques in Director because most of your cast members will probably be bitmaps from Photoshop or Fireworks or other image editors. So let me now move on to the next movie and go into more detail about how to import bitmaps into Director.