Basic Compositing
7
Use the Motion editing tools to perform basic layout tasks: selecting, moving, rotating,
scaling, distorting, cropping, changing a layer’s anchor point, and manipulating drop
shadows. These editing tools are available on the left side of the toolbar. When you choose
an editing tool, specific onscreen controls become available in the Canvas; drag these
controls to perform the selected action.
Drag a corner handle to resize the object.
Additional controls in the HUD let you change each selected layer’s opacity, blend mode,
and drop shadow settings.
The onscreen controls and the HUD controls correspond to parameters that appear in
the Properties Inspector. Adjustments made in the Canvas are simultaneously updated
in the Inspector and HUD, and vice versa. For example, if you’re using the Select/Transform
tool and you change a layer’s scale by dragging its corner handles in the Canvas, the
layer’s Scale parameter is updated in the Properties Inspector.
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Chapter 7
Basic Compositing
When you begin to lay out a composition, it’s a good idea to start by creating a static
layout of your project that represents how it looks at the beginning, end, or at a particular
moment in time. In addition to manipulating the geometry of layers in your project, you
can also alter their opacity to adjust how overlapping elements of your layout merge
together. Blend modes provide further control over the appearance of overlapping layers,
accentuating or stylizing the colors of the topmost layers based on the colors of underlying
layers.
After you create an initial layout, you can animate the layers you’ve added to set your
project in Motion. For more information about animating layers and their properties, see
Keyframing in Motion
.