MACROMEDIA DIRECTOR MX-USING DIRECTOR MX, Use Manual

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CHAPTER 4
Cast Members and Cast Windows
Cast members are the media and other assets in your movie. They can be bitmaps, vector shapes,
text, scripts, sounds, Macromedia Flash movies, QuickTime movies, AVI videos, and more.
When you place a cast member on the Stage or in the Score, you create a sprite. For more
information on sprites, see Chapter 5, “Sprites,” on page 157.
You use windows called casts to group and organize your cast members. To populate casts, you
import and create cast members. You can create and use multiple casts in a movie. You can also
group multiple cast windows together in a tabbed panel layout:
Cast window with tabs in Thumbnail view
You can create and edit cast members in Macromedia Director MX using basic tools and media
editors such as the Paint and Text windows, and you can also edit cast members using external
editors. In addition, you can import cast members from nearly every popular media format into a
movie file. For some media types, you can link cast members as external files located on a disk or
the Internet. Linked cast members can be updated dynamically.
The Property inspector contains asset management fields for cast members on the Member tab.
These fields let you name your cast members, add comments about them, and view information
such as creation and modification dates, and file size.