The canvas

The project canvas

Every project has one shape and one resolution, chosen when it is made and changeable at any time after. Twelve ratios ship, from 9:16 for Reels to 2.39:1 Cinemascope, plus a custom size for anything they miss.

Framing a clip

Select a clip and its box appears on the frame. Drag the box to move it, the corner and edge handles to resize, and the arm above it to rotate. Every gesture is a single undo step, however long the drag was.

Position, scale, rotation

The clip's base transform, and all of it keyframes. Scale 1 is the largest box with the source's aspect ratio that fits the canvas.

Opacity

On the same base item, keyframable like the rest.

Alt-click to pick

Cycles down through overlapping layers under the cursor. What you would select is outlined with its name beside it before you commit, so it is a choice rather than a guess.

Zoom and fit

⌘/Ctrl + wheel zooms at the cursor; double-click fits the frame to the window. The Hand tool pans.

Cropping

Take the Crop tool (R) and click a clip: the crop handles appear on the frame and the edges pull in. Crop is an effect on the clip's rack rather than a destructive edit, so its four edges keyframe like anything else — a crop that opens up over two seconds is four curves.

Shapes and the pen

A shape layer is a clip made of paths. Three things create one and they all end at the same geometry, which is the whole design: the pen, the shape tool, and importing an SVG.

Pen P

Draw a path — click for a corner, drag for a curve, click the first point to close

Shape U

Drag out a rectangle, ellipse or triangle — shift to constrain

Crop R

Click a clip to crop it on the preview

Selected, and editing

Two levels, because they answer different questions. Selected is "this is the thing I am moving and restyling": the handle is a box around the shape and the path is one object. Editing is "I am inside it": the handles are the anchors themselves, and a box would only be in the way of them. Double-click to go in, Esc to come out.

Once inside, the same double-click is about points: on the outline it adds one, on a point it takes it away. A point added part-way along a curve splits that curve rather than being dropped into it, so the shape you had is the shape you still have — the alternative is a corner appearing in the middle of an arc you were only adding a handle to.

Move V

Move points and their handles

Bend B

Drag a point to curve the path through it — drag back onto it to make it a corner again

Both only appear while a shape is open for editing. A rack that always showed them would be a rack with two dead buttons on it most of the time — neither means anything without a path to point at.

Rounded corners

Rounding is a property rather than an edit. Rounding destructively turns a rectangle's four anchors into eight, and once it has there are no corners left to un-round and no number left to drag — so the stored path stays the four anchors and the rounding happens on the way to being drawn. Only actual corners are cut; a point whose handles are already out is a curve passing through, with no angle to inscribe anything in.

Importing an SVG

An SVG becomes editable geometry on import — the same paths the pen makes — and the file behind it is a source you can drag again rather than something the compositor reads. Every curve becomes a cubic, with arcs and quadratics converted exactly rather than approximated, because a logo's rounded corner is usually an arc and a wrong one is visible.

Masking with a shape layer

There is no separate mask tool, and that is deliberate: a mask is a drawn shape, and you already have those. Put a shape layer above the clip you want to cut and press MASK in the shape rack. The layer stops drawing itself and cuts the lane below it to its own shape instead.

Everything about the shape still works — the pen, the point tools, the corner radius, the fill's opacity, which becomes how much of the picture gets through. Four settings are about the cut itself:

Combine

How this shape lands on the shapes under it in the same layer: over, subtract, intersect or difference. An ellipse with a subtracted circle is a ring.

Invert

Cover everywhere the shape is not. It inverts the one shape rather than the layer, so an inverted circle subtracted from a rectangle leaves the circle.

Feather

How wide the soft edge is, spread half inside the shape and half outside it.

Expand

Pushes the shape out, or negative, pulls it in, without moving a single point — which is what makes it usable on an outline you would not want to redraw.

All four work on a shape layer that is painting, too. A feathered shape is a soft-edged shape whether or not anything is being cut with it.

Solids

A solid is a clip that is one colour, filling the frame. It exists to be a surface: a background under a key, something for a generator like Fractal Noise or Gradient Ramp to draw into, or the content of a track matte. Everything downstream treats it as an ordinary source.

On-canvas effect handles

Some effects put handles on the frame — a lens flare's centre, a corner pin's four corners, a magnify's focus point, a wire removal's two ends. Dragging one writes to the same parameter the rack's number field does, so a dragged handle keyframes exactly like a typed value.

• The handles are positioned in the clip's own frame and then carried through its transform, so a focus point stays on the subject when the clip is moved, scaled or rotated.
• An effect gets this by declaring which parameters its handles name. Nothing about the canvas knows what any particular effect does.

Getting around the frame

⌘/Ctrl + wheel

Zoom at the cursor

Double-click

Fit the frame to the window

H

Hand tool — drag to pan

Shift + drag

Align to guides and to other clips

⌥ + click

Pick the layer under the cursor, cycling down

Esc

Leave a shape you are editing

What each of these does to a title is on Text & captions, and animating any of it is on Keyframes.