Adjusting the Tempo

When you're animating sprites in the Score, you need to pay attention to the timing of your action. You can simply eyeball it, of courseand you sometimes willbut it's still a good idea to know your unit of time. It makes it easier to think of the animation timing.

The movie's tempo setting is what controls its playback speed. On an older machine your movie still may play slower than the tempo setting, but even on a very fast machine the movie will never play faster than the tempo setting. Director always tries to maintain the tempo you set.

You'll recall that the effects channel in the Score contains the tempo channel where you can set the tempo on a frame-by-frame basis. For this project you just want to set the tempo and forget about it. But what do you set it to? Director's default of 30 fps might be a little much for some machines, so we'll drop it to 15 fps instead.

In planning your animation, you now know that if you want something to last two seconds, it will need 30 frames (15 x 2). If, on the other hand, your animation should happen in half a second, you'll want to place your keyframes seven or eight frames apart (15/2).

1.

If the effects channel in the Score isn't showing, Right/Cmd-click in the frame bar and choose Effects Channel. Now double-click frame 1 of the tempo channel. When you double-click in the tempo channel, Director assumes you want to change the tempo setting at that frame so the Frame Properties: Tempo dialog opens, defaulted to 30 frames per second.

2.

Using the slider and buttons, adjust the tempo to 15 fps. When the tempo is set to 15 fps, click OK to close the dialog. When you do, an indicator will appear in the Score, telling you that the tempo changes on that frame. If you roll the cursor over the marker, the tempo setting "15" appears as a tooltip. A tempo setting stays in effect until another tempo change is encountered. Because we placed the change at frame 1and won't place another onethe 15 fps setting will last the full length of the movie. Before moving on, you might want to collapse the effects channel to allow you to see more sprite channels, but this is up to you. Many developers prefer to leave the effects channel open all the time.