Working With Footage; Adding And Revealing Footage; To Add One Or More Footage Items To A Composition - Adobe AFTER EFFECTS 7.0 Manual

Center of work area bar.
•
To expand the work area to the size of the composition, double-click the center of the work area bar.
See also
"About rendering" on page 590

Working with footage

Adding and revealing footage

Once you have created a new composition and imported footage into the project, you can add footage items or
another composition to it. You can use individual items in the Project panel any number of times in one or more
compositions.
Items added to a composition by dragging them onto the Composition panel (or onto a composition in the Project
panel) will snap to the beginning of the timeline (0.00s) by default. (To change this setting, choose Edit >
Preferences > General (Windows) or After Effects > Preferences > General (Mac OS), and then deselect Create
Layers At Composition Start Time. This will cause footage items to appear at the current-time indicator.) After you
add a layer, you can move it to any position within the Composition panel. When you add multiple footage items,
they appear in the composition in the order selected.
In the Composition panel, layers are visible only if they are active at the time currently displayed. For example, if you
have three layers in a composition, with two of the layers starting at the beginning of the composition and one layer
starting at 6 seconds, only two of the layers appear in the Composition panel when the current-time indicator is set
to the beginning of the composition.
Note: Although you cannot directly add a composition to itself, you can duplicate a composition and add the copy to the
original.
See also
"Viewing and setting the current time" on page 120
"About trimming" on page 162

To add one or more footage items to a composition

Click the tab of the Timeline panel for the composition to which you want to add an item.
1
2 Select one or more footage items in the Project panel.
Drag the footage items, the footage-item thumbnails, or a folder from the Project panel to one of three places:
3
•
The Composition panel.
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User Guide