Subtitles of the Movie

Let me now go over in more detail some of the more important of the Director windows. These are the windows you'll use all the time when working on your Director projects, starting with the Stage, which I have open here. The Stage really dominates the Director workspace. It's the part of the movie that your users will see. In fact, it's the only part of Director that your users will see so this outline here designates the boundary of what's visible. The space out here to the left and right and up and down is the work area and that area will not be seen by the users. You use the Stage to determine where media elements, which are called cast members, should appear on screen. Actually, they're called Sprites. If I delete this Sprite and demonstrate how that got there, I open up the Cast Window. You'll see there's thumbnails of all the members of my cast and I simply click on the VTC logo and drag it onto the Stage. Now it's called a Sprite. Cast member is here. More about Sprites and cast members later. Now, I can modify these elements, these Sprite elements on my Stage. If I choose the Tool Palette, keep that, I usually keep that open to the left and then I select the black arrow tool or the Pointer tool. I can then manipulate these Sprites including their size. I also have properties down here, notice, of that Sprite. I can also modify the properties of the Stage or the project, the Director project itself by clicking in the work area over here so that everything is deselected on the Stage and then choosing from the main menu window Property Inspector. Notice that there is a Movie tab there where I can change the size of the Stage, the number of channel that will be displayed in the Score, as well as the color of the Stage. I can enter hexadecimal value or choose a color from the color chip. Let's choose purples; a little bit bright. Black is another common Stage color but it's easy to change the color of the Stage and the size here in the Movie tab of the Property Inspector. Notice I also have a Guides tab so you can add guides to help you guide your objects. Notice that that changes, the Property Inspector changes as soon as I select a Sprite, but if I click on the Stage you can see there's the Guides tab. Change the color of the guides, rather they're visible, whether items snap to it, you'll be dragging the guides from the ruler. You also have a grid that can be composed of dots or lines. You can add these grids by choosing View, Guides and Grid, Show Grid. There's my grid and that's the lines version. I can also change the grid to dots. That's a little bit hard to see. Let's change the color. Make them visible and invisible. There are the dots right there. Let's change that back to a very bright red and you'll be hard to see there but they're right there. Spaced 64 pixels apart. Let's make that ten pixels on the width and ten pixels on the height. Now you can see those dots a little bit better. I can also go back to the lines. There's my lines. Very fine grid. So you have some control over how you place Sprites on the Stage using these various tools, the Guides and the Grid.