Apple Motion 4 - Manual (Page 310)

Using the Adjust Crop Tool
The Adjust Crop tool activates onscreen cropping handles that you can drag to resize the
borders of an object.
Cropping allows you to chop off each of the four edges of an object to eliminate parts
you don’t want to see in your composition. Common examples of objects you’d want to
crop are video clips with a black line along the right or left edge because of the video
format or with vignetting around the edges because of a wide-angle lens. You can use
the crop operation to cut these undesirable artifacts out when using them in your
composition. You could also crop an object to isolate a single element of the image, so
long as that element can be adequately cut out with a simple rectangular shape.
Before cropping After cropping
Cropping in the Inspector Versus Cropping in the Media Tab
When you crop an imported image using the onscreen transform tool (which is the
same as using the Crop controls in the object’s Properties tab), only the instance of that
file is cropped. The source image in the Media tab is not cropped. To crop the source
image, you must select the object in the Media tab of the Project pane, then use the
Crop tools in the Media tab of the Inspector. For more information, see
Controls in the
Media Tab of the Inspector .
Note: If you need to isolate a more irregularly shaped object, or you want to create a
border of a particular shape, see
Using Shapes, Masks, and Paint Strokes for more
information.
310 Chapter 7 Basic Compositing