Subtitles of the Movie

Let me now review the various components of the Director workspace. The Director workspace is designed to make the most efficient use of the space on your screen but because there's so many parts to Director, which I'll introduce to you shortly, you'll often find that your screen gets very cluttered so part of my intent in this section of the tutorial is also to teach you how to maintain this efficiency of workspace on your screen. I think the easiest way to be introduced to the various components of Director is to close everything down and you can do that by going up to the main menu and choosing window and then clicking all the checkmarks off so that all you're left with is the Stage. You'll probably find that there's a variety of things that are opened when you first open Director so I recommend closing them all and leave the Stage on. The Stage, as I introduced in the previous movie, is where all the action takes place. This is the only part of the Director interface that the end user will see. All the other panels and windows are tools for you to create your Director projects. And then what I recommend is just going right down the list here. Notice that this is the Macintosh user interface so you have a COMMAND+0, this will be a CTRL+0 on the PC, but if you open up that first one or press COMMAND+0 or just click on the Script window, you'll get a tab. These tabbed Panel groups can be docked together. This also makes the most of the features in Director. And then there's an X over here to close that tab. So that's the Script window where you'll be writing your Lingo scripts. Then you have COMMAND+1 is the Stage, which is on be default. Then you have your Control Panel, number two there, COMMAND+2 here on the Mac. I always leave my Control Panel open. This is for controlling the playback of your Director movies. I'll be talking more about the Control Panel a little bit later. Then three is the Cast Window that I introduced in the previous movie. This is where all the components or cast members of your Director movies will reside. It's sort of like a database. Notice I can also click on the COMMAND+3 or go back here or click on cast again and that will toggle these various windows on and off. So you may want to turn these off as you go through them. Also you can close the windows in the upper left-hand corner, at least here in the Mac Operating system there's an X there. Now let's go back to number four, COMMAND+4 is the Score. This is where you'll be adding instruction for when and how various Sprites, which are these objects here, cast members placed on the Stage are called Sprites, where these Sprites occur and how is controlled here in the Score. Next you have the Message Window where Director will be giving you messages if there's problems. Oftentimes this is the first indication of a problem is you'll get a Lingo message telling you the nature of the problem. Continuing down my list we have the Paint Window which is five, the Message Window is COMMAND+M. Paint Window is where you can create bitmap graphics using paint-like tools. You can also work on graphics in Photoshop and then import them into Director. You also have a Vector Shape tool for creating graphics, vector graphics. So Director has built-in editors for both vector and bitmap graphics and I'll be going over much more in detail the differences between these two and when would you use the Vector Shape tool versus the Paint tool. Let's continue down my tour here. Next is the Text tool for creating and formatting your text elements. Now, there's different kinds of text. There's also Field text, which I'll introduce to you again later as we move through this tutorial. Director handles video quite well so here in the Macintosh interface there's a QuickTime window for controlling and working with your QuickTime movies. After that we have the Shockwave 3D Panel for working with 3D objects in Director; more on that towards the end of the course. Then there's a DVD Panel, which is new in Director 11. You have a RealMedia. Because I'm on the Mac I'm getting this error; to play correctly this Shockwave movie required Real.com's RealPlayer. I don't have the RealPlayer installed on my Mac here so I'm going to say no. And there's the RealMedia Player however, its interface. You also have an Object Inspector, Library Palette, behavior Inspector, Text Inspector, alignment options, color palettes, markers and other panels and Panel sets that I'll be introducing a little bit later in this tutorial.