Digital Video Editing with Final Cut Express

5	Compositing andSpecial Effects

What Exactly Is Compositing?

Periodically, we have mentioned the word “compositing” in the course of this book. What does this term mean? Compositing, in its most literal sense, means taking a stack of items and making them into one item. Compositing in Final Cut Express involves the process of taking more than one image and integrating or combining those various images into one image. As one Final Cut Express guru put it, “Compositing is everything above Video Layer 1.” Compositing is the way that special effects are created. As we discovered when we worked with the sequence, Final Cut Express allows up to 99 separate video tracks (see Figure 5-1). The good news is that in this manner Final Cut Express ...