Chapter 4. Compositions

Without compositions, a project is merely a list of footage items: a grocery list, but not a recipe; an ensemble without choreography; finely tuned instruments without, well, a composition. More literally speaking, compositions describe how you arrange the footage items in space and in time.

In this chapter, you learn how to create a composition and define its spatial and temporal boundaries—settings such as frame size, frame rate, duration, and so on. The footage items you add to a composition become layers, which are manipulated in the defined space and time of the composition, as represented by the Composition and Time Layout windows. You'll not only get an overview of these windows, but also the Time Controls palette.

Though relatively short, this chapter establishes a fundamental process: layering footage in compositions. Nearly all the other chapters are dedicated to the ways you can manipulate those layers.