What is Electrifier Pro? | Understanding the Interface | Understanding Multimedia Authoring | Understanding Movies, Actors, and Sprite Tracks

Understanding the interface

Electrifier Pro's interface is based on a familiar yet powerful drag-and-drop work model. This makes Electrifier Pro easy to learn and operate, and ensures that your creativity will not be stifled by an excessive learning curve. In fact, you will be creating sophisticated multimedia within minutes.

And you will enjoy immediate feedback to all your commands. With Electrifier Pro, there are no fifteen-minute delays while you wait for your project to "build." No matter what stage you are at in your project you can always preview and edit your work.

All features are easily accessible from the menus and palettes that make up the Electrifier Pro interface. The five key components are the the Menu bar, the Movie window, the Tool palette, the Inspector Palette, and the Modifier Palette.

All Electrifier palettes are floating palettes--that is, they can be positioned anywhere on your screen.

The Menu bar

The Menu bar is the located at the very top of the screen. When using Electrifier Pro you can choose commands from up to eight menus: the File menu, Edit menu, Movie menu, Actor menu, Scene menu, Arrange menu, Web menu, and Window menu.

Clicking a menu name in the Menu bar displays the list of commands in that menu. Not all commands within a menu are available at all times, only those relevant to the current situation. You can choose a command if it is written in regular, not dimmed, letters.

The Menu bar

File menu

Edit menu

Movie menu

Actor menu

Content menu

Arrange menu

Text menu

Web menu

Window menu

For more information

For more information about Electrifier Pro's menus, see the relevant sections in the Menu Reference.

The Movie Window

The Movie window is where movies are displayed. You can work with your movie in three different views: the Layout view, the Preview view, and the Structure view. Each view provides a different way of looking at your movie, and offers you different ways of working with it

Layout view

Create your movies in the Layout pane, which displays an interactive paste-up view of your document. In the Layout view, you can move, rotate, and skew actors, or even put them in 3-D perspective, with Electrifier Pro's intuitive transformation tools. You can also use the Inspector and Modifier palettes to set an actor's attributes precisely, or apply effects and actions. You can switch the Movie window to Layout view by clicking the Layout tab.

Preview view

Critique your movies in the Preview pane, which shows you how your movie will be viewed by the rest of the world. It offers an instant preview of your current settings so you can experiment with new options without penalties. You can switch the Movie window to Preview view by clicking the Preview tab. Use the Movie controller that appears at the bottom of the Movie window in Preview mode to manually control the playback of a movie.

Structure view

Customize your movie in the Structure pane, which displays a hierarchical view of your document so that you can manage large and complex multimedia documents quickly and efficiently. The Structure pane displays the actor hierarchy using a familiar indented list format that makes it easy to view and work with groups of actors, even when they are invisible, or hidden behind other actors.

The Structure view also includes a timeline view of Electrifier's effects-based animation structure, for users who are familiar with timeline-based animation.

The Tool Palette

The Tool palette provides the ability to edit your actors visually in Electrifier Pro. When the Movie window is in the Layout view, you can use the tool set to manipulate 2-D and 3-D Actors, make clouds, fire, and interactive ripples, and enter and edit text in your movie.

For more information

To learn more about the Tool palette, see the Tool palette section in the Window and Palette Reference.

The Modifier palette

The Modifiers palette contains the effects and actions which control how an actor will change over time or respond to user actions.

The Modifiers palette is composed of two tabs: the Effects tab and the Actions tab. The Effects tab contains a list of nineteen visual and audio effects and the Actions tab contains a list of twenty interactive actions.

Effects

Actions

The Inspector palette

The Inspector palette gives exact feedback about actors and lets you control many characteristics of an actor. An actor's start time and duration in a scene, ink, position, size, orientation, volume, and balance are all designated by precise values on the Inspector palette. These values can be changed by typing in new values--which are then instantly applied to the actor in the Layout view of the Movie window.

Use the Inspector palette as an alternative to the Tool palette when fine-tuning an actor's characteristics--especially if precise values are a necessity. You can also use the Inspector palette as a way to test different numerical values if you have trouble visualizing how an actor will look when applying a customized effect.

The characteristics assigned to an actor using an Effect or Action override the characteristics assigned using the Inspector palette. For example, if you set an actor's Ink to Reverse using the Inspector palette, and then apply a 0%-100% Fade effect to that actor, the actor will fade from 0% opaque to 100% opaque rather than from 0% reversed to 100% reversed. This also occurs if multiple Effects are applied which change the same characteristic--only the last effect is applied.

For more information

For detailed information about the Inspector palette, see the Inspector palette section of the Window and Palette Reference.

What is Electrifier Pro? | Understanding the Interface | Understanding Multimedia Authoring | Understanding Movies, Actors, and Sprite Tracks

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