Using Director > Color, Tempo, and Transitions > About tempo |  |

About tempo

Tempo is the number of frames per second that Director tries to play. You can control tempo using the Score tempo channel or Lingo's `puppetTempo` command.

Director tempo settings control the maximum speed at which the playback head moves from frame to frame. The tempo doesn't affect the duration of any transitions set in the transition channel, nor does it control the speed at which a sound or digital video plays. Note that tempo settings don't always control animated GIFs; see Using animated GIFs.

Settings in the tempo channel can also make a movie pause and wait for a mouse click or key press. For information on making a movie wait for a cue point in a sound or video, see Synchronizing media.

For simple movies, using the tempo channel is often the best way to define tempos. For more sophisticated control of the speed of a movie, use Lingo's `puppetTempo` command to control tempo.

You can't make a movie go faster than the computer allows. Many factors can make movies play more slowly than the specified tempo, such as the following:

| Playing the movie on a slower computer
| Making the movie wait for cast members to download from a slow Internet connection
| Animating several large sprites at the same time
| Animating stretched sprites
| Color depth differences between the movie and monitor
| Animating sprites that have blend values