Director 5's Stage, the end user's screen, is where the action occurs. To choreograph a sequence, we dragged cast members from the Cast window to the Score window and dropped them into one of the score's 48 sprite channels. There are other special channels to hold your palettes, scripts, sounds, and tempo changes. This basic approach has not changed from Director 4, but fortunately, many of the operations that you perform with the score have been streamlined. Text cast members have been improved in this version.
Large text is automatically anti-aliased relative to the background to smooth out jagged lines.
In previous versions, aliasing made it difficult to display diagonal lines. Editable text is now bitmapped when the movie plays, and Macromedia has improved the program's text-importing capabilities. The graphics cast members can now include 24-bit graphics images. One of the most interesting new features is called Onion Skinning. It allows the developer to position a ghosted image of other cast members beneath the current cast member to make subtle changes to an image or maintain consistent positioning of cast-member elements.