Now, the next panel that comes after the source or layer name which the one you wish to have is set to is called “the switches panel” and you can see is called that really because it has a series of switches at the top that relate to certain properties that can be activated on a layer.
So, some layers have the ability to have these switches applied and some of them do not, depends on the type of layer it is all the things that it can actually do. Now, the first item here can be applied to every layer and this is called “the shiny switch”.
Now, as an example of how this works. Let say we were coming down here to the funky.aif file. What we are going to do is toil down this options by clicking just to the left here at the label color and we can see we have access to the audio information. Click on that to toil that down as well and we see we also have a wave form we could click and toil this down also.
We put ourselves in the situation where the other layers have been moved up at the top of the timeline and if they are actually there, they could give us even less room to work with here. Let us maybe adjust the height here of the timeline by crunching the interface just a little bit. You can see that we do not have enough room in this small amount of space to view the entire wave form.
With shy layers help in this respect as well. If we just scroll all the way back up to top here. What we are going to do is click on the shy icon here for the first layer and hold the mouse down, and drag down through the second and third, fourth, fifth and sixth layers to make all of those shy.
Now, nothing changes. Nothing at the timeline has change. Nothing in the composition has changed. But a lot of these switches only turn them on for the layers. You also have to use that composition switches up here to actually make them work.
So, what we have done here is tell this ladies that if we are to use the shy function, this layer would become hidden in the timeline where she is going to make it shy. Well, this is the main composition shy switch that we see here as soon as you click it, all of the layers that were made shy have now been removed from the timeline and we have only the AIF file in here. If we decide to scroll up and down. All we have access to is the wave form, all of the other layers have effectively been removed from the timeline.
Now, they have been removed from the composition, you can still see them up here. So, that be fooled into thinking that they have actually been deleted but at the same time it is going back to the similar option of when we so low the layer. Eventhough the layers are not visible and they have been shied, you could still select them and delete them by mistake. I will show you how.
If we just toil up the audio layer here, just bring the whole thing up, press command A or control A on the PC to “Select All”. In the composition window, you can see a whole series of points that become active, that’s because we have selected all the layers even though they shy here in the timeline. If we turn off the shy option. You can that the layers are still there. When they are shy you still have the ability to select them all and you could remove them by mistake.
So what I sometimes suggest is, if you are going to the trouble to shy a layer. You might also want to make sure that the layer is lock. So, you do not accidentally change in any shape or form. Once you come back, you can easily unlock it again. Just one of those things that might catch you out in something. I have seen a lot in production and hate for you to run into that same situation.
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