All language subtitles for 4. Customizing the Node Display

So let's take a look at some things inside this

Blur node that we renamed earlier, by double-clicking on it.

Let's go into this Node tab,

and I'd like to show you this attribute called Hide Input.

Now if we click on this Hide Input, it's going to hide the input,

but what does that mean?

It means this little arrow right here is going to

disappear if this node isn't selected.

So, let me show you.

I'm going to deselect, and the input disappears.

Now this might seem like kind of a dirty trick to play on people

that might be looking into your comp later,

or working with work that you've already done,

but that's not the case at all.

There's nothing malicious about this,

you'll just get into a place where you've got so many nodes connected

that sometimes it's helpful to just turn those off,

just for brevity and clarity of the visuals of the

comp that you're dealing with.

These things get pretty crazy at some points,

and it's nice to be able to turn these inputs off so that

they don't get too confusing when you're going back into

your work a couple of days later.

The next feature I'd like to share with you is called postage stamping,

and you'll notice this little icon in the Read node,

that's a postage stamp,

and Read nodes by default have postage stamping turned on.

But,

what if we want to get that same nice little icon on other

nodes to see what those other nodes are doing?

So if I double-click on this, I can go to the attribute called postage stamp,

and turn that on,

and I'll get an icon in the node that shows us what the node is doing.

Now if I want to select a specific frame in an animation,

that's what this number's for.

So you can just change this to frame 15 if you want,

and it'll show you frame 15 down here in the icon.

So if I go to this Desaturation node, and turn on postage stamping,

we'll see an icon of what that node is doing too.

So let's say you want to change the color of a node.

You'll notice that these Blur nodes are orange by default,

and Color Correction nodes are blue by default,

but let's say we wanted to change the color of this one.

You just double-click on it and go to this button,

open this button up, and change the color,

and you'll notice that this button changes from orange to red,

and our node changed to red too.

If you want to change the text of the color,

it's not this button, which seems a little counter-intuitive,

but all of the font properties are contained inside this row.

So if you want to change the font color,

you can change the font color right here with this attribute.

This button is actually for nodes that contain tools

that you see up in the Viewer.

So if I go back to this Roto node, you'll see that the Roto node has a tool,

and the tool is being shown to us as a red box,

to show us where the mask is that we're drawing,

and so you can change the color of that by clicking on that second button.

Let's go ahead and delete these nodes,

and what I would like to show you next is creating toolsets.

Toolsets are essentially built for operations that you'll be

performing over and over and over again,

where you don't want to rebuild pieces of the comp tree you've already built.

For example, down below here, we have an image that we've blurred,

and we've desaturated it.

So let's say we're going to blur and desaturate 50 other images,

and we don't want to keep creating Blur nodes and

keep creating Desaturation nodes.

Well what we can do is we can just marquee select these two,

right-click, and there's an option here called Toolsets.

Click on Create, and this menu pops up.

It's asking us what we want our new tool to be called,

and we'll just type in here: BlurDesat, and hit Create,

and now a tool's been created.

So if you right-click, and go to Toolsets,

you'll see our tool pop up right here, and if we click on it,

it will add those two nodes that we made our tool with to the comp.

And if we just connect them back up,

they do the same exact thing that we did down here.

Now, those tools that we just created will also show up in the Tab menu,

so if we deselect this and hit Tab on the keyboard,

and type Blur, our tool will now show up in that Tab menu,

and we can just add it back to our comp again.

If this is a tool we don't think we'll be using very often,

you can right-click, go to Toolsets, hover over Delete,

and our tool shows up there.

You just click on that, it's going to ask you if you're sure about that,

you say yes, and now our tool doesn't exist anymore,

and it won't show up in the menu either.