Subtitles of the Movie

One Director element that's so indispensible so you should probably keep it open at all times is the Property Inspector. Many of the Adobe applications such as Dreamweaver, Flash and Fireworks have property inspectors. The Director property Inspector works in much the same way. Every cast member and Sprite in a movie has properties and you can view and change these properties by using the Property Inspector. In addition to cast members and Sprites, the entire movie also has a set of properties. You can access these properties by clicking on the element in questions either here on the Stage or in the Cast Window. Notice that as I change by clicking on different types of cast members or Sprites, my Property Inspector changes. For example, when I click on a text element, I get a Text tab. When I click on an audio element, I get a Sount tab where I can loop the sound, play the sound, stop the sound. Here's a video cast member. This is an AVI video. I also have QuickTime cast members and this will change to a QuickTime tab. But I can set the properties here including show the video, show the audio, preload the video, loop it or pause it at the beginning. Bitmap cast members or bitmap Sprites have a Sprite tab here as well as a Bitmap tab. Notice that my movie properties can be set right here in the Movie tab, including the Stage size, the number of channels, the color of the state, the palette that I'm using and so on. Here's the behavior here in the Cast Window and it has a script tab here in the Property Inspector where I can set the type of script; whether it's a movie script, a behavior script or a parent script, as well as whether it's Lingo or JavaScript. So I recommend that you take some time now, add some different types of cast members to a project and then open up the Property Inspector and familiarize yourself with the various settings here. Now, like other windows in Director, the Property Inspector allows you to control its appearance. You can choose between a List View and a Graphical View. The Graphical View is the Default View. You're going to see this kind of information in the very Graphical View. But you have a List View here. You can move into the List View Mode by clicking on the List View Mode button at the top of the Property Inspector. That gives you the properties for that cast member in a list arrangement; much more detailed. You can also hide to display the most common properties for each type of cast member. For example, the most common properties for an AVI video clip are the sound, pause and start, loop, preload. But you can also display additional properties: Direct to Stage, Crop, Center and Setting the Video to True. So as you're working you'll want to switch between List View and Graphical View here in the Property Inspector. Now, one interesting way that the Property Inspector displays information about that cast member is if you select multiple Sprites or cast members, the Property Inspector displays only the properties that apply to all the selected items. So, for example, let's select my audio file, a text file, a video file and a graphics file. Notice that there are a series of Xs through many of the properties. Let's go back to Graphical View. Here you can see that I only have the cast tab and the member tab. Those are the only things that these types of cast members that I've selected have in common. Notice that I've selected two bitmaps so I have a Bitmap tab. But as soon as I select my audio file, that Bitmap tab disappears and I only get the member and the cast tabs for controlling the properties of those cast members and as soon as I click back on my bitmaps, the Bitmap tab reappears. So to summarize, I would keep your Property Inspector open at all times. You can minimize it here to the, to the right. Keep it out of the way but you want to keep it pretty much handy at all times by opening it up. I usually leave it over here to the right. You'll use the Property Inspector to observe the properties of that cast member or Sprite, as well as to change the properties of that cast member or the Sprite. Let me now move on to the final movie in this section of the tutorial. And that is a review of another very indispensable tool in Director and that's the Tool Palette.