Playing portions of a QT movie with Director

Question

By using loopBounds I thought I could have a user click on a
button which would begin looping an interval in a QT movie which
had been cited in a loopBounds statement. Is that correct?
If so, why doesn't the following statement placed at the
beginning of the sprite containing the QT movie entitled "Water
1994" produce the error message "Script error: Name expected"?
on beginSprite me
sprite(me."water 1994").loopBounds[(3.00*60*60.4.50*60*60)]
end
I had hoped that it would play the 3.00 - 4.50 minute
interval in the QT movie "water 1994" repeatedly until the user
clicked a button to go somewhere else.
(Part of this is probably my difficulty in going from the the
verbose Director 2004 scripting to Director MX dot syntax format.
Do I have to use an integral number of minutes?)
Fred Tabbutt, retired faculty

Answer 1

When you place a behavior on a sprite, the reference to the
sprite is "me". In that behavior if you want to find the actual
sprite number, you can ask for the value of the built in property
spriteNum, as in "me.spriteNum". To aid in the speed of playback
and to make the code more readable, it is ordinary to define the
value of me.spriteNum in the behavior like this:
property thisSprite
on beginSprite me
thisSprite = me.spriteNum
end
or
property thisSprite
on beginSprite me
thisSprite = sprite(me.spriteNum)
end
then you can refer to the current sprite through that
property variable.
In the last few versions of Director you have been able to
name sprites. I personally find this just plain silly and
potentially very confusing for new users as many new users have
difficulty differentiating between cast members and sprites.
In a behavior, when you want to reference a sprite, you
usually do it by referencing its channel number as in sprite(2). If
you don't want to use the actual number, then you can use
sprite(me.spriteNum) to have Lingo get the number for you. If
you've used one of the beginSprite functions that I listed above,
then you can use sprite(thisSprite), from the first example, or,
simply thisSprite from the second example.
Having said all of that, if you will just use one of the
examples that Sean gave to you, I think that you will find that the
code will work as expected.