Subtitles of the Movie

Preferences give you the ability as the end user to change how you interact with Combustion. Whether you want to set how many undo's you have or even change the color of your interface. I like mine as a nice charcoal so that it's relaxing on my eye. But you might prefer to have it brighter. Let's talk about how to change some of these Preferences. On a Mac, you'll find the Preferences under the Combustion Menu and in many applications, under the actual name of the application as you see here. On the Windows PC platform, chances are very good you'll find the Preferences located in the Edit Menu. So I'll choose Preferences and let's go ahead and start off with General. Now, there are a lot to talk about, so I'm going to stick with the most commonly used ones that are going to make the most impact on your workflow. So General allows us to change whether we see Tool Tips when we hover our mouse over something. Let me just show you very quickly. I'll put my mouse here and a little Tool Tip appears and tells me the name of the tool. Very handy, especially when you're first learning the application. If you want to have Combustion automatically save for you every couple of minutes, enable this by clicking and you can enter 10 or 5 or whatever you're comfortable with. You can also have Combustion save for you incrementally. You can also choose how you display your time; as time code, frames and so on. You can tell Combustion what to do at startup of the application itself. So you can have it open your very last workspace that you worked on or a new workspace or nothing, as I normally have it on so I can determine what I want to do every single time I launch the application. I can also tell Combustion how many undo's I like to have. So if I'm not very confident in my skills, I might want to bump this all the way to four billion. But I'm pretty confident that I don't need to go back 25 times, so I'll leave it at that. Monitors allows you to float palettes. As you see, I have the Toolbar in the workspace floating because in my Float Category, I have those guys set to On. If I had more than one monitor, I can also arrange which tools are going to be floating on which monitors. Very handy, but I only have one monitor. I cry. Now, I can go to Caching to tell Combustion how much memory it should use so that when I want to play things in a RAM preview, for example, it'll have the room to do it. Eighty-seven is the default and I highly recommend that you leave it right there. Let's take a look at Colors. As you see, my scheme is set to charcoal, but you might want yours brighter, so you might choose platinum. And now my eyes are hurting. This is too bright for me and this is, I think, how Combustion is when it ships and I think it's just way too bright. But you can even use the slider here to change how your interface works for you. You can make it all the way to whatever color you want. So I could enter one, for example, and I could just use the slider and do whatever I need to to change that. You can change other colors in the interface as well. Speaking of colors, you can change how your guides and grids look in Combustion as well by choosing the Guides and Grids Section here. You can also change the spacing of those things as far as how the lines are displayed. So you can have lines, dots or dashed lines with your grids. With Transparency, I can choose a pattern size to show me the transparent areas in my scenes. And don't forget, guys, if you've never used Photoshop, this is what you'll find as standard in the applications; a little checkerboard like this. These do not print out. You just, they're here to show you that there's, well, nothing there honestly, so you'll see a fish or whatever artwork you're bringing in just floating on this empty space and you can change those colors by clicking on these swatches. You can also change the color whenever you're working in Alpha. So it's normally on red. So whenever you're creating a mask, you'll see red where you have the mask. Let's take a look at Paint now. You can determine how your brush will look when you're painting. You can see the brush as an outline and as crosshairs and what you can also do is choose a Default Object Duration. So let's say you're in frame one and you draw something. That object will be on frame one till the very end of your Timeline. So if you have three minutes worth of animation, you'll have three minutes of that object. You can also have it set to one frame so that it's only going to show up one time on that one frame. We'll talk more about this in the Onion Skinning Section.