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Connecting and Disconnecting Nodes
Once you’ve started to add nodes to your composition, you need to connect them to perform their intended operations.
Node Basics
Each node displays small colored knots around the edges. One or more arrows represent inputs, and the square represent the tool’s processed output, of which there is always only one. Outputs are white if they’re connected properly, gray if they’re disconnected, or red to let you know that something’s wrong and the node cannot process properly.
A Blur node with a Foreground Input, Mask Input, and Output.
Each node takes as its input the output of the node before it. By connecting a MediaIn node’s output to a Blur node, you move image data from the MediaIn node to the Blur node, which does something to process the image before the Blur node’s output is in turn passed to the next node in the tree.
Two nodes connected together.
How to Connect Nodes
To manually connect one node to another, click on one node’s output and drag a connection line out to drop on another node’s input. The order in which you drag node connections is not important; you can just as easily drag a connection from one node’s input to another node’s output and get the same results.
Before (top), and after (bottom) dragging a connection line and dropping it to connect two nodes.