Adobe AFTER EFFECTS 5.5 Help Manual page 265

Adobe After Effects Help
Using Help | Contents
Customizing Flowchart View
You can customize Flowchart View using the Flowchart View menu. Specify the type of
lines between elements (angled or straight), justification, what tiles appear (layers with or
without showing effects), and flow direction. The menu also includes a Cleanup command
to reorganize elements in aligned flowcharts.
You can also use the four buttons along the bottom of the Flowchart View window, which
are shortcuts for many of these menu commands. The Show Effects button ( ) is unique
because it also serves as a slider for the justification commands. Use the slider by holding
down Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac OS) as you drag the slider.
For keyboard shortcuts for these and other procedures, see the After Effects 5.0 Quick
Reference Card. For tool tips identifying the buttons in the Flowchart View window,
let your pointer hover over a button until the tool tip appears.
You can change the tile label colors in Flowchart View using a context menu.
To change label colors in Flowchart View:
1 Select the tile you want to change to a different color.
2 Right-click (Windows) or Control+click (Mac OS) the name section of the tile, and
choose the color (or None) you want to apply.
To apply the new color to all elements in that label group, choose Select Label Group
from the context menu to select all those items before you do step 2.
Using Flowchart View to make changes
You can make some changes to your project from within the Flowchart View window.
You can delete elements by selecting them and pressing Delete. If the selected element is
a footage item or composition, it is deleted from the project and no longer appears in the
Timeline and Project windows. If the selected element is a layer, it is deleted from the
composition in which it appears.
You can change other properties of a selected element by right-clicking (Windows) or
Control-clicking (Mac OS) the icon to the left of the name in the element tile. The icons
have various appearances, depending on the element type, such as layers ( ), composi-
tions ( ), audio footage ( ), and so forth. For example, you can use the icon context
menu to work with masks and effects or to change switches, apply transformations, and
adjust quality.
Note: When you change element properties in Flowchart View, be careful to click the icon
in the tile, not the name of the element. The context menu associated with the element
icon is different from the one that opens from the element name.
Organizing a project using nesting
When you nest compositions, you organize your project into a hierarchy. In its simplest
form, nesting means that you combine two or more compositions into one main compo-
sition from which you render the final movie. A composition inside another composition
becomes a layer within the parent composition.
Use composition nesting to save time working and rendering. With composition nesting,
you can do the following:
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