From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Auto-nesting - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2019 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

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Auto-nesting

- [Instructor] For this tutorial, I'm using a new project called Combining Multiple Effects. This project has a version of our jacuzzi sequence and it's just been a little bit cleaned up so we can now continue and work on some effects. We've got two versions of the sequence in the sequences bin. The one we're looking at right now, which is described as version one, and if I double click on the version two, you can see there are already some effects applied so you can compare and contrast. I'm going to go back to this version one and just as a clip for us to work on, I'm going to pick this shot that's a little after 40 seconds into the sequence. I want to give this film what I would call a little bit of a more filmic look, so we're going to put some letter boxing on to make the image wider or appear wider at least. I'm going to go to the effect palate and in the film section of the filters category, I'm going to take this 1.66 mask and drag this onto the clip. Looking in the composer window at this preview monitor, it kind of looks as if the clip has been shrunk. You can see this wide outline around the image, but what's actually happened is we've got black letter boxing applied at the top and bottom of the image, so it's actually cropping the image and applying a background color. Just to illustrate what's going on, if I turn off the scaling fixed aspect control and adjust the height, you can see very clearly what's happening. The original image is still behind the crop, so this is really just a preset that happens to be set to 1.66 to one. I'll just undo to restore that 80% crop. Now, let's say I want to make an adjustment to the size of this image as well, so I'm going to go to the image category and I'm going to take our resize effect and I'm going to drop this onto the clip as well. As soon as I do this, of course, the resize effect replaces the mask that I already had on the clip. This is what happens any segment effect onto another segment effect, so I'm going to undo and this time I'm going to drag the resize effect on again, but I'm going to hold our favorite modifier key, which is alt on Windows or option on Mac OS. So I'm holding alt here on Windows and I'm dragging the effect on top of the mask and I release the mouse and now you can see that we've got the resize icon on the clip segment in the timeline window, but we're still retaining the mask. You can combine any number of segment effects this way in Media Composer. Just hold down alt or option and drag the effect you want onto the clip. The technique is called autonesting and we'll look at how you can navigate nested clips and effects in a moment.

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