Director MX 2004 Interface

 


 

 

 

Director MX 2004 Interface    
Director’s Theater/Film Metaphor

Director began as an animation tool, and its interface reflects that history. Since animation usually involves characters moving around and doing things, Director’s central metaphor is that of a film or a play.

A Director project is called a Movie; the elements that make up the movie are called the Cast; the place where the action takes place is called the Stage; and the window that control all the action is called the Score (timeline).


When creating and editing a movie, you typically work in five key windows: the Stage, the Score, the Cast window, the Property Inspector, and the Control Panel.
 


The Stage

The Stage is the visible portion of a movie on which you determine where your media elements appear.

During authoring you have the ability to define the properties of your Stage, such as its size and color. As you work on your movie, you can use zooming to make the Stage either larger or smaller than the original movie, while also scaling the coordinates for the Stage objects. To align objects on the Stage, you can choose to display guides and grids or use the Align window.



The Score

The Score organizes and controls media elements over a linear timeline in rows called channels and in columns called frames. The Score displays a movie’s timeline and monitors the playback frame by frame. A frame represents a single point in a movie. The Score includes special channels that control the movie’s tempo, sound, transitions, and color palettes.


The Cast window

The Cast window is the storage area that contains your media elements, such as graphics, images, digital videos, sounds, animations, text, color palettes, film loops and scripts. The media elements in the Cast window are called Cast members.

In the Cast window, you can view your cast members as a list or as thumbnails, or small images.You can create your own cast members, and you can import existing media to include in your cast.

You can also open or create casts to organize sets of cast members. When you open Director with a new movie, the Cast window is called Internal Cast.

The Property Inspector

Instead of dialog boxes that let you view and change information related to different Director elements, Director now uses a single, tabbed Property Inspector. The tabs visible in the Property Inspector change to reflect the properties of the selected elements.

The Property Inspector provides a convenient way to view and change attributes of any selected object, or multiple objects, in your movie. Once you select an object, relevant category tabs and associated fields for it appear on the Property Inspector. If you select multiple objects, only the information common to all of the selected objects appears.

The following illustrations show different information appearing in the Property Inspector depending on what is selected. In the first illustration, a sprite is selected. In the second illustration, a cast member is selected.


The Control Panel

The Control Panel governs how movies playback of your movie, including Rewind, Stop, and Play buttons. You can also modify volume and playback settings.
You can also use the toolbar buttons or keyboard shortcuts to play a movie. To go to a specific frame number, enter the number in the frame counter and press Enter (Windows) or Return (Macintosh).

 

 

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