Subtitles of the Movie

Another Director window that is so indispensable that together with the Property Inspector and the Control Panel I just leave open all the time is the tools window and I usually leave that open in the upper left-hand corner. Perhaps the most useful tool here is the black arrow or the Selection tool. Use the black Arrow tool to select and move your Sprites on the Stage and also the Score so that I can click my Sprites in the Score and move them using this tool to different channels. I can adjust Sprite spans with this tool. This is just really something that you'll be doing so often that you'll want to keep your Tools Panel open. Other indispensable tools here are the Magnifying Glass. We can zoom in or out. I'm holding down the ALT key and that will select the zoom out portion of the tool. You'll use the hand tool in conjunction with the Magnifying Glass to move once you've zoomed in and moved the Stage around so you can see it. If you double click on the Magnifying Glass, that'll bring up the view at a hundred percent, which is sometimes convenient to know. Continuing through my list of tools here in the tools window, there's also a rotate and skew tool which you can use to both rotate and skew your Stage Sprites. You'll want to move your mouse around until you get the correct icon for your mouse cursor. There's the rotate icon. There's the skew icon right there. Notice that I can also rotate and skew text Sprites. I also have a Text tool right here, handy Text tool in the Tools Panel where I can add text as well as I can add lines. There's also a Line Property where I can adjust the property, at least the thickness of the line. Let me go ahead and move off of this area here and let's demonstrate the line tool. There's the line tool with the various thicknesses that you can set. There are a series of geometric shape tools such as the filled rectangle, open rectangle, this is the filled, round rectangle as well as the open round rectangle and your ellipses, filled and open ellipse. Pretty standard, basic. These are vector tools or vector graphics that I'm creating with these vector tools. Much more about the vector drawing capabilities of Director a little bit later in the tutorial. I've also got some checkboxes and radio buttons and other interface components here. Notice that I just click on the Stage and it creates the checkbox. Click again and it creates another checkbox. We don't want to do that. That's actually an animation tool, which I'll show you later. So there's my checkbox. It can also do radio buttons. Again, just clicking on the Stage after selecting the tool in the tool window will give you your radio buttons and checkboxes. You can see how often I'm using my Arrow tool to line up all these elements, select them and move them around. You've also got a text input tool here for allowing your users to input text during run time. More on that capability a little bit later, as well as your simple buttons that rewind and play this. Let's go ahead and manipulate this a little bit in the, in this score so we can see these buttons so we get a chance to actually press them. Let's expand out the duration of those buttons. Let's also zoom out on my Stage, rewind and play. Notice that the button animates when I press it. It doesn't do anything yet because I haven't added Lingo script, but it's a working animated button. And lastly, at the base of the tools window I have my color chips, foreground and background as well as my texture chip. You'll use the foreground and background color chips when you do textures. Notice that my foreground and background is black and white, so my texture uses those two colors. But I can change those. Let's change this to a bright red and let's change the white to a bright blue and you can see that the colors change in that texture. You can also use the texture chip here. There's some different textures using those two colors. We can also use the texture chip to set up your tile settings. Tiles allow you to repeat a graphic pattern, thereby saving you in size and bandwidth. Notice that I can use as a source of the tile a cast member or the built-in tiles here. For example, if we go with this one, let's go ahead and change my color chips here back to black and white and there's the built-in tile there. And there's a grading. Notice that I've set up that tile and now I can use it. That's a built-in tile. I can also use cast members as tile. So for example, there's the VTC logo and there's a little selection rectangle. I'm selecting this portion of the VTC logo as a tile here. If I choose the V, that's going to create a different type of tile. So that's a tool that you may want to experiment with. You can also adjust the width and the height of the tiles to be either 16, 32, 64 or 128 pixels in dimension. So that gives you a good example of the foreground and background color chips as well as the texture and tile chip here at the base of the tools window. That will conclude this section of the tutorial, providing a review of the various components of the Director workspace. Let me now move on to the next section of the tutorial about cast members. Talk about using the Cast Window, creating bitmaps and importing bitmaps as well as working with bitmaps and bitmap filters, creating vector shapes, using external editors and much, much more.