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These controls appear in Tiles mode.
— Active Tile: This menu serves two purposes. First, it defines which tile the current clip is displayed within. This becomes important later on when you apply this effect to other superimposed clips you want to use together in a layout. However, this control also determines which tile you further customize using the Tile-based controls of the Inspector. If you enable the Open FX Overlay of the Timeline Viewer, each tile has its own overlay that lets you click a tile in the Viewer to make that the Active Tile.
— Bring Tile Forward/Send Tile Back: These two buttons let you rearrange the order of tiles in the Active Tile drop-down menu.
— Manual Tile Management: While this checkbox is turned off (the default), changing the Columns and Rows parameters automatically updates the Active Tile drop-down menu with one tile per node on the resulting grid arrangement. Turning this checkbox on lets you Add and Delete tiles manually, which lets you create more advanced layouts with overlapping tiles and asymmetric spacing between tiles.
Mute Tiles
These controls appear in Tiles mode. A single checkbox parameter, Mute Tile, lets you enable and disable the visibility of the active tile. This checkbox is keyframable, so you can animate the appearance and disappearance of different tiles to create different effects.
Custom Size/Shape
These controls appear in Tiles mode. They let you further customize layouts on a tile-by-tile basis and can also be used to quickly and easily animate a single tile to move and resize itself around the grid of the overall layout.
— Start/End Column and Row: These four controls serve two purposes, letting you change a tile’s position by row and column number, or enlarge a tile to encompass multiple tile row or column positions (“spanning”). To use these parameters, you must first choose which tile you want to adjust from the Active Tile drop-down menu. With the tile you want to edit active, you can then drag the appropriate sliders to create either effect, as explained below.
— To change Tile Position: When adjusted together so that the Start and End values are identical, they let you manually adjust the position of each tile in the grid that’s defined by the number of rows and columns you’ve set. This is particularly useful when you want to quickly keyframe animated changes to tile position, in order to jump a tile around the grid of the layout.
— To make a tile span multiple positions: Setting the Start and End Row and/or Column parameters to different values changes the currently active tile to span multiple grid positions in the layout, making that tile bigger in order to create asymmetric arrangements of larger and smaller tiles. You can also keyframe these values to easily animate the effect of a tile expanding to occupy more grid positions, or shrinking from occupying several grid positions to occupying a single position.