From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Auto-nesting - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

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Auto-nesting

- [Narrator] 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, and the sequence is been the one we're looking at right now, which is described as version 1. And if I double click on the version 2, you can see there are already some effects applied. So you can compare and contrast. I'm going to go back to this version 1. 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 letterboxing on to make the image wider or appear wider, at least. I'm going to go to the effect palette, and in the film section of the filters category, I'm going to take this 1.66 mask and drag this on to 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 white outline around the image. But what's actually happened is we've got black letterboxing 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 1.66:1. I 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 when you drag any segment effect on to 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 macOS. 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, auto nesting, and we'll look at how you can navigate nested clips and effects in a moment.

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