Bill Russell
Forum Replies Created
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Ah ha! Thank you!!! Yes, that’s what it is. Somehow I invoked it with a keystroke at some point. Never seen it before in all this time, been freakin’ me out!! Thank you hugely, Dave — Cheereo.
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🙂 Oh yes, I use the V key all the time and have for a long time! Anyway… ‘cept, the gray box is not a mask. It’s not a comp element or a layer property… what is that thing?
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You could do it with scripting, but poor man’s route would be to simply nest (pre-compose) the “clip” you created. You put the clip in a nest, then treat the nest as a single “clip” that you can use anywhere. (The nest also appears in your project window as a new comp. You can put comps within comps). Make sense?
If you want to loop, then you can do a nest within a nest. Put the animation in a nest, then loop that nest by duplicating it several times and butt end to end. Then you can nest all THAT in order to have a single “clip” available that contains your animation looping. Make sense? You can always go back and edit the the original nested animation anytime.
To create a nest (aka pre-compose it), select the layers of the animation you want to use as a clip and then select “pre-compose” from the layer menu.
Hope something is useful here!
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Here, to explain, here is a screen grab movie:
https://www.yousendit.com/download/Q01HRm96Y1NoMlUwTVE9PQ
The box I am dragging around is not associated with a layer. You’ll see me do some undo / redo, which affects Comp history but does not affect gray box at all. You’ll also see me edit things within the comp. What is this gray box, and where did it come from? (It all started with a sudden crosshair cursor, something I cannot reproduce).
I assume this is a simple thing, it just totally mystifies me.
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Hi, thank you for your reply! So, nope, it IS a Comp window. It is a Comp tab with the name of my Comp in it.
It now has this permanent four-cornered gray box outline which I have had to drag out to the edge of the comp in order to work within. If you don’t touch the box, it doesn’t cause any trouble. If you drag the box smaller, than only that portion of the Comp “shows through”. It is INDEPENDENT of comp functions and UNDO / REDO. It is some sort of window within a window. Is this a new thing is CS3?
And how do I control it and/or get rid of it?
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Well, what I wanted to do was select some text in a layer, activate a macro that applied particular attributes to that selected text. What is happening now is I am doing several credit rolls, AND the clients are sending significant updates as (not versioned, unfortunately) full text files for EACH roll. It is a bear to cut and paste in a whole new credit roll text set, then start from scratch selecting a header and formatting it (color, size and other font/style attributes), then select the name below the headert, manually do that, then select the next header, and on and on and on… EACH time. And do that for EACH credit roll text file that comes in.
Is the answer a glorifed way of saying I’m pretty much stuck doing it this way?
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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Thanks – well, though being able to recapture thirty-four hours — shot for shot — in a day or two down time isn’t gonna happen.
It’s funny, because the drift (and it’s a drift, not a simple offset) begins right away. It doesn’t “pop” in after a tape break or anything like that. Still?
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –
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Yup, big capture nows…
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Hi there.
What is your destination? Do you plan to render the movie and play it out of firewire onto DV tape? Or export a standard DV NTSC movie file? If so, then I recommend that you keep the sequence at default DV NTSC settings (720×480), and instead fit the 640×480 movie into the sequence. Some versions of final cut will correctly cut 640×480 square right into 720×480 non-square with no scale/aspect adjustment needed. But if the 640×480 movie does not cut into the 720×480 sequence full frame – you still get the black bars you mention — then simply double-click the clip already in the sequence to open it in the viewer, go to the motion tab, and adjust the scale and distort values in an exact relationship — ie, if scale is +12.5, then distort aspect should be -12.5. Adjust until the image fits exactly. Then you can apply these same motion tab attributes to the clip in the bin, and continue editing with this clip from the bin.
HOWEVER, perhaps you need a 640×480 movie? Is it for the web? Then there are two possibilities here.
1. One is that your Quicktime movie not actually 640×480. Newer versions of Quicktime sometimes “correct” for non-square pixels and report the dimensions of a 720×480 video as the way it displays at 640×480. So all you have to do is check the dimensions in Final Cut instead of Quicktime. To do this, select the clip and choose “Item Properties” (or hit Apple-9). In there you will see the actual dimensions of the video.
2. It is, in fact, 640×480. In this case, though you have fixed the dimensions of the sequence to match 640×480, there are still a couple of settings you need to change. Select the sequence and choose “Sequence Settings” (or hit Apple-Zero). You need to change the pixel aspect to 4:3 / SQUARE, and make sure that anamorphic is NOT selected. Then re-edit your clip into the timeline, and now it should fit just right.
Cheers. Let me know!
“THE LOST SKELETON OF CADAVRA” –