Cropping Footage

To crop off unnecessary edge material in your media, use the Output controls on the Footage Controls panel together with the Crop tool on the Toolbar. When the Footage operator is the current operator and the Crop tool is selected, a Crop box appears in the viewport.

Also, if the footage contains an alpha channel, combustion can automatically crop off the unused portions of the frames. The two ways this is done are by creating a crop value keyframe for each frame, or by analyzing the whole clip and setting a global value across all frames.

You can also crop a layer using negative values to increase the size of the layer. For example, if you import an Illustrator file, the aspect ratio of the new layer containing the Illustrator object (Illustrator files are converted to Paint operators in combustion) is determined by the size of the Illustrator object, and may be smaller than the aspect ratio of the composite. You may need to enlarge the layer to accommodate any animation you apply to the Illustrator object.

You can keyframe crop settings. When the Footage operator is selected, crop values appear in the Timeline. For information, see Keyframing.

To crop the footage:

1. In the Workspace panel, double-click the Footage operator to make it the current operator in the viewport.
2. Show the Output controls for the Footage operator.
3. Do any of the following:
• Show the Toolbar and select the Crop tool. Adjust the Crop box in the viewport. Disable Show Cropping to see beyond the Crop box edges.



• Adjust the Cropping values to crop material. The Right and Bottom sliders work opposite of the usual direction to make them more intuitive for cropping.



• Select an option from the Cropping list.

Available cropping options include the following.



Select:	To:
Manual Crop	Manually crop the edges off the selected footage using the Top, Left, Right, and Bottom fields.
Individual Frame	Analyze the footage's alpha and set crop keyframe values to crop unused edges for each frame. When you select this option, the footage is automatically analyzed and processed.
Combine Frame	Analyze the footage's alpha and set one global crop value for the entire sequence. When you select this option, the footage is automatically analyzed and processed.

To cancel the processing, click Stop on the Cropping dialog that appears.

Note: Click the R button to reset the crop values to their default settings.