Cast members are the media and other assets in your movie. They can be bitmaps, vector shapes, text, scripts, sounds, Adobe Flash content or components, DVD content, QuickTime movies, Windows Media video or audio, Shockwave Player 3D content, rich text, sounds of various formats, and more. When you place a cast member on the Stage or in the Score, you create a sprite. For more information about sprites, see Sprites.

Use windows called Cast windows to group and organize your cast members. To populate casts, import and create cast members. You can create and use multiple casts in a movie, and you can group multiple Cast windows together in a tabbed panel layout.

You can create and edit cast members in Director by using basic tools and media editors such as the Paint and Text windows, or you can edit cast members by using external editors. In addition, you can import cast members from almost every popular media format into a movie file. For some media types, you can link cast members as external files located on a disk or the Internet. Linked cast members can be updated dynamically.

The Property inspector contains asset management fields for cast members on the Member tab. These fields let you name cast members, add comments about them, and view information such as creation and modification dates and file size.

Casts can be internal (stored inside the movie file and exclusive to that movie) or external (stored outside the movie file and available for sharing with other movies). When you create a new movie, an empty internal cast is created automatically. When you open the Cast window, the cast is in the default List view. For more information about Cast window views, see Switching from one Cast window view to another.

External casts are also useful for creating groups of commonly used cast members. Use external casts to switch large groups of cast members in a single step. For example, to switch the text cast members in your movie from English to French, switch the cast that the movie uses, rather than changing each individual cast member.

Using external casts can keep the movie size small for downloading. This is because an external cast can be downloaded separately from the movie file if or when it is needed.