Creating the Storyboard

Creating a Storyboard Sequence is wonderfully and refreshingly easy. It's just a matter of drag and drop.

The big advantage of the Storyboard is that any of these clips can be dragged to the desktop and sorted into any play order you like. The clips can even be shuffled around inside the Project Browser by simply dragging and dropping them.

Tip

• The five clips used in this chapter are available for download from www.peachpit.com/liquid6vqp. Although, you can also use your own clips to complete the next set of tasks.

To create a Storyboard Sequence

1.

If you are using a single screen monitor, open the Storyboard as described earlier and click the All tab if it is not already displayed. This displays your clips on the right with the Rack Folders and Racks on the left (Figure 5.10). Figure 5.10. The Project Browser with the clips displayed as Picons. All of the media clips stored on your computer can be accessed from here.

2.

Drag your clips onto the desktop in the order you want to be played. Figure 5.11 shows a sequence with a car approaching the viewer; a cut to the hands steering the car; another cut to the viewpoint of the driver; a cut of the mirror; and finally, a cut to the car retreating. This is the beginning, middle, and end of the story, or scene, in this case. Figure 5.11. Five clips have been dragged onto the desktop creating five overlapping Storyboard elements. This overlapping order is how playback order is determined.

Tip

• The examples in this section show you how to create a project in small, manageable building blocks, rather than trying to assemble an epic film that is one very long timeline. Imagine Lord of the Rings sitting on your Liquid Edition Timeline. Tracking the changes and even finding individual scenes would become time consuming and frustrating. A much easier and more logical approach would be to split the job up into bite-sized sequences that could be assembled into an epic later.

For more details on creating and using Sequences, see Chapter 6.

Show the First and Last Frames

A Picon can also be set to display the first and last frame of a clip. This is known as displaying the Head and Tails.

If you hold down the Alt key and left-click this clip, the media clip will play inside this Picon.

Right-click a Storyboard element and select Picon View > Mark In/Out Large (Figure 5.12).

Figure 5.12. The Picon View allows you to set the size of the Picon and its display properties.

This displays the element as shown in Figure 5.13.

Figure 5.13. Here the Picon's display properties have been altered to show both the start and finish point of the clip.