Apple Motion 4 - Manual (Page 290)

Compositing Workflow
Once you import the objects you need for your project, the first step is to arrange the
objects within the Canvas to come up with the general design of your piece. Even before
you animate anything, you should decide what size each object should be, where
everything should be positioned, if any objects need to be rotated to fit where they need
to be, and so on. You can also make more extreme manipulations to create other effects.
For example, you could crop out unwanted parts of a particular object.
You can use different transform tools, each of which allow you to perform basic
compositing tasks such as selecting, moving, rotating, scaling, shearing, corner-pinning,
cropping, changing an object’s anchor point, and manipulating drop shadows. The
transform tools are available in the View section of the Toolbar. When you switch among
the transform tools, different onscreen controls appear in the Canvas. Drag these controls
to perform the selected transform action.
The onscreen transform controls for shapes include an additional roundness handle. For
more information, see
Creating and Editing Shapes .
Drag a corner handle of
an object in transform
mode to resize it.
Additional controls in the HUD let you change each selected object’s opacity, blend mode,
and drop shadow settings.
290 Chapter 7 Basic Compositing