User Manual

Create/Play Preview
You can right-click a node, and choose an option from the Create/Preview Play On submenu of
the contextual menu to render and play a preview of any node’s output on one of the available
viewers. The Render Settings dialog is displayed, and after accepting the settings, the tool will
be rendered and the resulting frames stored in RAM for fast playback on that view.
TIP: Hold the Shift key when selecting the viewer from the menu to bypass the Render
dialog and to start creating the preview immediately using the default settings or the
last settings used to create a preview.
Connecting and Disconnecting Nodes
Once you’ve started to add nodes to your composition, you need to connect them to perform
their intended operations.
Node Basics
Each node displays small colored knots around the edges. One or more arrows represent
inputs, and the square represent the tool’s processed output, of which there is always only one.
Outputs are white if they’re connected properly, gray if they’re disconnected, or red to let you
know that something’s wrong and the node cannot process properly.
A Blur node with a Foreground Input, Mask Input, and Output.
Each node takes as its input the output of the node before it. By connecting a MediaIn node’s
output to a Blur node, you move image data from the MediaIn node to the Blur node, which
does something to process the image before the Blur node’s output is in turn passed to the
next node in the tree.
Two nodes connected together.
How to Connect Nodes
To manually connect one node to another, click on one node’s output and drag a connection
line out to drop on another node’s input. The order in which you drag node connections is not
important; you can just as easily drag a connection from one node’s input to another node’s
output and get the same results.
Chapter – 56 Working in the Node Editor 1079