Sprites.  A sprite is an object that controls when, where, and how cast members appear in a Macromedia Director MX movie.  The registration point of the sprit is a marker that appears on the sprite when you select it. By default, Director assigns a registration point in the center of all bitmaps. You can change the location of the registration point using the Paint.  Registration points provide a fixed reference point within an image, thereby helping you align sprites and control them from Lingo  Registration points are crucial to precisely placing vector shapes, bitmaps, and all cast members that appear on the Stage  Moving the registration point is useful for preparing a series of images for animation

Changing Sprite properties.  You can change sprite properties using: The Property inspector The Sprite toolbar, which includes a subset of Sprite fields found in the Property inspector The Sprite Overlay, which displays, directly on the Stage, the most commonly used properties for selected sprites Sprite labels, which appear within the sprite bars in the Score and let you view important sprite properties Lingo  Let us see how some of the properties can be changed.

Setting Sprite Span  Sprite Span: is the frames in which the sprite occurs. Normally the sprite span default is set at 28 frames  You can set the Sprite Span on the Stage by Using the Start frame and End frame on the Sprite toolbar. Holding and dragging the starting and ending point in a sprite channel to its right or left frame.

Changing it size & location  You can resize sprites directly on the Stage by dragging their handles or you can enter coordinates or scale sprites by a specified percentage on the Sprite tab in the Property inspector.  Rearranging The Sprites by dragging a selected sprite to its new location.  Changing a sprite’s size on the Stage doesn’t change the size of the cast member that is assigned to the sprite, nor is the size of the sprite affected if you resize its cast member.  Scale a sprite by pixels or by an exact percentage

Rotate, skew, and flip  You can rotate and skew sprites to turn and distort images and to create dramatic animated effects.  To rotate and skew sprites more precisely, use Lingo or the Property inspector to enter degrees of rotation or skew.  The Property inspector is also useful for rotating and skewing several sprites at once by the same angle.  Director can rotate and skew bitmaps, text, vector shapes, Flash movies, QuickTime videos, and animated GIFs.

Rotate, skew, and flip (2)  Director rotates a sprite around its registration point  Rotation changes the angle of the sprite. Skewing changes the corner angles of the sprite’s rectangle  Flipping a sprite creates a horizontally or vertically inverted image of the original sprite.

Change the color of sprite  Changing the color without affecting cast members.  Selecting a new foreground color changes black pixels within the sprite to the selected color and blends dark colors with the new color  Selecting a new background color changes white pixels within the sprite to the selected color and blends light colors with the new color.

Change the ink property of sprite  You can use the ink property to change the blending percentage.  Make a sprite color transparent.  To change a sprite’s blend setting, use the Sprite tab in the Property inspector.

Ink properties  Copy displays all the original colors in a sprite. It is the default ink and is useful for backgrounds or for sprites that do not appear in front of other artwork. If the cast member is not rectangular, a white box appears around the sprite when it passes in front of another sprite or appears on a nonwhite background.  Matte removes the white bounding rectangle around a sprite.  Background Transparent makes all the pixels in the background color of the selected sprite appear transparent and permits the background to be seen.  Transparent makes all light colors transparent so you can see lighter objects beneath the sprite.  Reverse reverses overlapping colors. When applied to the foreground sprite, where colors overlap, the upper color changes to the opposite of the color beneath it.  Ghost, like Reverse, reverses overlapping colors, except nonoverlapping colors are transparent. The sprite is not visible unless it is overlapping another sprite.  Not Copy reverses all the colors in an image to create a chromatic negative of the original.  Not Transparent, Not Reverse, and Not Ghost are all variations of other effects.  Mask determines the exact transparent of a sprite.  Blend ensures that the sprite uses the color blend percentage that is specified on the Sprite tab in the Property inspector. Darkest/Lightest compares RGB pixel colors in the foreground and background and uses the darkest/Lightest pixel color.

Layering in Director  Layering is the method that lets you lay out what is to appear first and what is to appear later on the stage.  Sprites in higher-numbered channels will appear on the stage before the sprites in lower- numbered channels.