Subtitles of the Movie

Moving back now to the Windows version of Director, we come to the Score. Like the Stage, the Score provides a view of your movie, but whereas the Stage provides a Graphical View where you can move things in two-dimensional space up or down or left or right, the Score provides a view of the movie's time line. This works in the dimension of time so notice that here I have the black box visible. If I move my current time indicator down the Score, then my text is visible and then the blue oval. So the Stage displays the point in time that is selected within the Score. So in that sense these two windows work very closely together. They're essentially the same representation of what's happening in your movie, just from different perspectives. The score organizes and controls a movies content over time in rows that are called channels. So notice, let me go ahead and close down the Tools Panel. Over here are your channels one at the top and then numbered down. Up at the very top of the Score there is a hide-show effects button and then you can see the effects channels including the tempo, color palette, transition and then two audio channels and then the Lingo channel for scripting. The score includes many Sprite channels for the movies. Sprites, remember that a Sprite occurs when you drag a cast member from the Cast Window on to the Stage or the Score. Sprite channels are numbered and control when Sprites appear in the movie. So these three are Sprites and notice that I can also overlap them so that all three Sprites occur at the same time. Additionally, the Score includes these effects channels where you can control the movie's tempo, sound Sprites, color palettes, transitions and scripted behaviors. The score displays channels in the order shown in the following order. It's a little bit counter-intuitive in that the number one channel, which is at the top, is actually at the bottom of the stack. So notice that my blue oval is on top of my black box since it's in a higher-numbered channel, namely, let's go ahead and open this up, channel number five. Actually, channel number six there. But I could rearrange this order by dragging and dropping the Sprites into a different channel. Now notice that my black box is in the highest-numbered channel, number four so it now is on top of the other Sprites. Let's bring my blue oval back in time with my others and notice that now my black box sits over the blue oval. To hide the contents of any channel on the Stage or to disable the contents if they're not visible Sprites, you'll use this little obscured button to the left of the Score. Notice if I click on this button right here to the left of my black box, the black box disappears. Let's go ahead and disable the channel containing the blue oval so it disappears and now the text is gone. Oftentimes my students will click on these buttons by mistake and they won't notice them and then their Score is blank and then it leads to some confusion since they don't see anything on the Stage. But this is a handy tool if you've got a lot of Sprites interacting with each other and you want to isolate them by hiding the other Sprites. You can also set preferences for the Score to control the appearance. So let me now move on to the next movie and review how to change your view of the Score and also how to change the Score settings using the Edit Preferences Score option right here. Let me go through the various settings here in the Score Window Preferences for extended display and the options. I'll cover each of these in the next movie.