Subtitles of the Movie

Let me close out this section of the tutorial on working with movies in a window in Director 11 with some techniques and scripts for controlling the appearance of a MIAW by setting different appearance properties using Lingo or JavaScript syntax. You can also set some default appearance properties by using the Display Template tab in the Property Inspector right here, the Display Template. You can set the type of window you want, for example you can set the type to Tool document or Dialog. You can also set how it will behave and act, for example a document window can have a title bar, make it resizable and have a Minimize and Maximize Box. The other options will lack those appearance features, I call them chrome, a Title Bar, a Minimize Bar, a Maximize Bar, because windows and Mac Operating systems handle windows differently some windows properties are only available on the windows platform that I'm showing you here. Let me start off by reviewing some window appearance properties and how to change those with scripting. I have my movie script handy right here and you'll notice that window appearance properties let you customize how your MIAWs look and behave. You can set these properties using Lingo or JavaScript syntax, the Display Template tab in the Property Inspector allows you to define some default values for a movie's window appearance properties as I mentioned earlier. Bring up that tab by clicking on the Stage anywhere, then click on the Display Template tab right there. First we get to the Title Property, this lets you set the text that appears in the title bar of the window, you'll notice that in my current example there's no title right here but I have a script ready to go, that says window, my movie.director.title equals and then the name of the title. Let's unremark that line there and now let's play the movie back and you'll notice that my movie in a window now has the title there, Movie in a Window. The Type Property which you can also set in the Property Inspector determines whether the window is a tool document or a dialog window type, if tool is selected the window can appear with a short title bar and small closed box. Tool windows do not receive, activate or deactivate events because they are always active. They appear on top of document windows but layer with each other, if document is selected the window can appear with a standard title bar, a clothes box and a Minimize and Maximize Box as I detailed earlier. Dialog is selected, the window has a standard title bar and a closed box, dialog windows are always on top and are modal. In other words then you can be closed before you can continue usually with the rest of the Director movie. The location property determines the distance of the window from the left side and top of the screen, these values specify pixels and they apply only if the Stage is smaller then the current monitor screen size. Centered places the window in the center of the monitor, this option is useful if the users play a movie that was created for a 13 inch screen on the larger screen or if you're creating a movie on a large screen that will be seen on smaller screens and again notice that for all of these that I've covered so far they have settings here for the main movie in the Display Template for the Property Inspector, including title, type, location, centered, resizable as well as title bar options, Maximize Box, close box, visible, minimize box and so on. The resizable property determines whether the MIAW or the main movie is resizable. Now in this script you'll notice that I have this property set to false, so if I play the movie back, notice that I cannot resize this window. Let's go back and stop the movie and set this property to true, demonstrate the difference and now you'll notice that this Movie in a Window is completely resizable. The docking setting determines whether the MIAW is dockable when open for authoring, then you also have a set of appearance properties that you can set, appearance properties let you determine how a window looks. For example if you're designing for a Mac application you can set the appearance to mimick a typical Mac window, these properties are accessed as part of the appearance option list. Drop Shadow will let you apply a shadow around the window, metal specifies whether a window has a metal or ice appearance and mask let's you assign a bitmap cast member as a mask for the window. These are all Mac only options. You also have a border property as well as a border drop down here in the Property Inspector, this sets the type of window border, it can be none for borderless window or pounce online is the property COMMAND+for one pixel black border. To create a borderless window you must set both the resizable and the title bar options to add visible property to false and here's an example of what this script would look like. First resizable set to false then title bar options visible is false and then appearance option.border equals pound sign none. That then will conclude this short section of this tutorial on working with movies in a window in Director 11. Let me now move onto the next section of the tutorial, distributing movies, starting off with some techniques and tips for planning for the distribution of your movies, including testing your movies to avoid problems, previewing movies in a browser, creating Shockwave content and projectors, all about Xtra extensions and much, much more.