User Guide

About tempo 159
Comparing actual speed with tempos
It’s good practice to test the performance of your movie on a system that is similar to that of your
users. Make sure the movie plays well on the slowest systems likely to be used.
The tempo you’ve set and the actual speed of a movie both appear in the floating Control panel.
Note: The Control panel attached to the bottom of the Stage does not include tempo settings.
Tempo settings are available only from the floating (detached) version of the Control panel. To
detach the Control panel from the Stage, Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh) the
Control panel. In the context menu, select Detach Control Panel.
To compare the actual speed of a movie with the tempos you’ve set:
1 Play the movie from start to finish, and then rewind it to the beginning.
2 Use the Step Forward button to step through the movie frame by frame.
3 In each frame, compare the tempo setting shown in the floating Control panel with the actual
speed shown there.
If you haven’t recorded the actual speed of a movie in a particular frame, the actual tempo field
displays two dashes (--).
Locking frame durations
To make Director play a movie at the same tempo on all types of computers, use the Lock Frame
Durations option in the Movie Playback Properties dialog box (see “Setting movie playback
options” on page 471). For frames without tempo settings, Director uses the current tempo. Lock
Frame Duration prevents a movie from playing too fast on a fast system, but it cannot prevent a
movie from playing slowly on a slow system.
To turn on Lock Frame Durations:
1 Select Modify > Movie > Playback.
2 Select Lock Frame Durations.
Controlling tempo with Lingo or JavaScript syntax
To override the tempo set in the movie’s tempo channel, you use the
puppetTempo() method.
This approach is useful when you want to change the movie’s tempo in response to conditions
that you can’t control, such as the type of computer the movie is playing on or a user’s action.
The
puppetTempo() method doesn’t retain control of the tempo channel. If the movie
encounters any tempo settings in the tempo channel, the
puppetTempo() settings are overridden.
For more information about
puppetTempo(), see the Scripting Reference topics in the Director
Help Panel.
Step Forward
Tempo setting
Actual tempo