Using the Spline and Paint Tools

You can draw two basic types of objects on an image: a spline object and a paint object. These are created using some of the tools that you see in the Tools palette, shown in Figure 11.2.

Figure 11.2 Drawing tools.

A spline object is a shape or path of some kind (using the same Bézier philosophy you encountered in Lesson 5, “Paint Effects”). Media Composer requires that spline objects be closed paths, but in Avid FX, this is not necessarily the case. You can close a path, in which case it can be filled with a color to create a shape that can have a border applied. Alternatively, the path can be left open and displayed as a line of some kind (using just the border controls and no fill). When you use any of the Spline tools—which include the Pen, Oval, Rectangle, Pencil, and Vector Trace tools—you create a new Spline track. You can also create an object called a spline primitive, which has many options for quickly creating special shapes such as stars, pie charts, arrows, grids, and much more.