How to create a rectangle by specifying the dimensions?

[Mark Spencer]

You can’t. Great feature request.

—
Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net

[Mark Spencer]

However, you can enable a grid, and set the grid to the exact spacing you want, and snap a rectangle to the grid.

—
Mark Spencer
Freelance Producer/Editor/Motion Graphics Artist
Apple-certified Master Trainer
Author, Motion 4 from Peachpit Press
https://www.applemotion.net

[Kj Stubbs]

Thanks for the excellent, simple recommendation.
For everyone’s edification, I am editing in SD 4:3. I wanted to create a 4:3 mask around the actress’s mouth, and have it follow her mouth using motion tracking. After I have a 4:3 mouth video for her dialog, I intend to use Red Giant to expand the mouth to 720×480 SD so that it fills the screen.
(We were rushed out of the location, so I never got to take an extreme close up of her mouth. This is my workaround.)
So I enabled the grid, set it to 10 pixel squares, and dragged to create a square mask. I aligned the square to the grid, which made the sides about 98.9% per side in the Scale parameter. Expanding the Y coordinate by 33.3%, to 132.2% in the Scale parameter, gave me a 4:3 aspect ratio.

mac osx 10.6.8
Final Cut Studio 6

[Bret Williams]

You could also draw a mask exactly the size of the canvas, and then simply scale it down proportionately. Or draw a mask that’s 4 squares by 3 squares And scale that proportionately.