Subtitles of the Movie

Let me now review the Control Panel. The Control Panel, which you can access by choosing window, Control Panel from the main menu or pressing COMMAND+2 here on my Mac Operating system allows you to control how movies play back in the authoring environment. Using the Control Panel you can jump to specific frames within the movie, control how many frames per second play on the Stage and change the volume at which sounds play. You can also use the Control Panel to start, stop and rewind movies on the Stage. Controlling movie playback is probably the most common use of the Control Panel. As you build a movie, you may want to check your progress periodically by watching the movie on the Stage so you'll use the Control Panel. Let's go ahead and rewind all the way to the beginning to frame one. Then press the play button. You can see the VTC logo fading in there. You can also stop the playback head at any time by pressing the stop button. There are additional playback controls here including one of my favorite, which is the stop-back key. This allows you to really see your animations frame by frame so you can see how smoothly or not so smoothly this VTC logo is fading in here. Next you've also got your tempo mode right here. You can either set this to frames per second or seconds per frame. More commonly you'll set that to frames per second. The default is 30 frames per second but I can change this tempo. Let's change it from 30 to one and rewind and play my movie back and notice this is much slower. Like it's so slow you can barely see that transition fade in there. But I could also, on the fly here, change the tempo. Notice it's rewind and play. Notice that I'm slowing it down and speeding it up live here. Stop the playback head as well. Next we have the loop control right here, the loop playback button. By default this is enabled so notice that if I rewind my Control Panel and play it it's going to go out to frame 30, play the VTC logo and then when it gets out to frame 75 or so it's going to repeat again in an infinite loop. So if we stop our playback and then change this to standard playback, notice that there's an arrow there that gets to the line indicating this is going to get to the end and then stop. So let's rewind, play it again. Notice that this time when I get out beyond frame 75 it stops right there; does not movie back. The reason for that is I have a control here, little Lingo script that will control that. If I take that out, notice what happens now. Let's bring our Stage back. Let's use the Control Panel to rewind and play and notice that this time by taking out that little Lingo script out there in frame 80, it gets to frame 30 and then stops because I've told loop playback to, or I've disabled the loop playback more accurately. Now, this time it'll get out to frame 30 and then loop again from the beginning so you can see really clearly the loop feature here of the Control Panel. Lastly I have my volume control: mute, soft, medium or loud. Very convenient to be able to control volume. Now, notice there's a mini Control Panel up here in the main interface, the top. I've only got rewind, stop and play. So I usually keep my Control Panel open at all times. I can check my tempo settings, change my volume and set my loop properties as well as controlling the playback with an expanded button set of controls above and beyond that, which is available here at the top of the interface. And the last setting here in the Control Panel is the for Selected Frames Only button. This one is a little bit tricky and requires some more demonstration. I'm going to go ahead and open up my Cast Window and drag and drop a title on here For All Your Training Needs and put that here. So I have two Sprites there on my time line or my score and I'm going to take the For All Your Training Needs and compress that in. Ok, now let's get out my Control Panel. Let's enable the selected frames only button. It looks like this when it's enabled and this when it's disabled. Notice if I select that Sprite span I get an enabled selected frames only and if I click on that button, I get this green bar right at the top here of my score. Now, if I play the movie with the Control Panel, notice that it will only play those selected frames. So essentially you're restricting playback to those frames that are underlined with green here or the green extends beyond. Now, notice if I click on this Sprite here and click on my selected frames only, it selects all those frames so now I'm working with frames one through 30. So if I rewind and play it, it plays all the way out to 30, whereas if I'm using this one to select my frames, now I'm only playing one through 14 or so. Notice that it stops right here. That's a little subtle tool. They're a little bit different than other authoring programs that you may have used like Flash. That's a little bit different tool. Again, select your Sprite span. The easiest way to do that is to select a Sprite that spans those number of frames and then click to disable the selected frames and then click on the Selected Frames Only button again. Then it just selects those frames that the Sprite is spanning. So notice if I rewind, it does rewind to the beginning but it will only play those selected frames. Notice that it jumped from frame one to frame 16 there. Watch. It goes to frame 16. So the selected frames only only works with some of the tools here in the Control Panel, namely play. If I do step back, notice that this also steps back beyond that range of frames that I have selected. So there you have the Control Panel. Pretty useful tool. I usually leave my Control Panel open somewhere in my workspace.