Subtitles of the Movie

The most basic type of operator that you'll create when you work with Combustion is a Composite Operator. A Composite Operator acts like a Workspace. It contains all of your assets, it contains your special effects, it contains everything. So your Composite is the end result of all your work inside of Combustion. But of course, it needs to live somewhere, hence the operator. Now operators in Combustion as a description, as something that's pretty easy to understand is simply a tool. An operator is a method whereby you create something. Whether you create text, whether you create particles or whether you create a composite to edit footage, you're creating something whereby you can work, hence the operator term. So I'm going to go to File, New, and as the type I will choose Composite. When you choose to make a Composite Operator, you can name it whatever you like here. You can also change the Format Options. And this part's pretty important and I will cover this section more in depth when it comes to talking about Format Options for film and for video and that kind of thing. But for now, this is the North American Standard, NTSC and very quickly PAL is most commonly used in European televisions. These guys down here are used for Hi-Def TV and for cinema, as in the movie theater. I'm going to leave my Duration set to the defaults and I'm going to choose my Mode as 2D. You can change it to 3D when you want to add a Camera and Lights and that kind of thing. So I'm going to choose 2D. I'll click OK, a new operator opens up and if I go to my Workspace, I see that I have a Composite Operator and there's nothing in it yet. So let's go ahead and put some footage inside of this Composite Operator. I'll go to File and I will Import some footage. And I have this video in a folder on my Desktop and I'm also going to bring this guy in here and I'm going to click OK. You'll notice that I have a Star Field and a Movie. If I click on the one that's highlighted, which is Star Field, I can move it around and I can see what's behind it. I can click on the Movie footage as well and move that around. I can reposition the layer arrangement by clicking and dragging. So now the Movie is on top of the Star Field. Whatever lives on the higher layer is what's in the foreground. So that's something to remember. Whatever's on the bottom of the stack is furthest from your eye in the composite. So this is on top, this is on the bottom. I can Hide things by clicking on this Icon right here and I can also do things by using the Composite Controls, such as sliding here to change the Position on the X and Y axis, the Rotation, Scale and I can click Proportional to Scale at the same time as far as height and width. I can Shear it and I can change the Pivot. So in a nutshell, this is what a Composite Operator will do for you. It gives you a place to add all of your footage, make your changes as far as Rotation, Position and other options and, of course, you have access to other things such as Layer Properties, Settings and Output. And I'll cover all of these later on in a tutorial.