Introduction to Master Properties

Master Properties give you the ability to more easily manage changes and versions across multiple graphics.

Let me show you what I mean.

If we look at our current project here, I am in the Norway composition and this composition has a pre-composition called Title_Animation and a background Stock piece of video.

So, I'm going to move back to the beginning of the Timeline and press the Spacebar so we can check out the animation.

You can see it's just a simply animated title.

But what if I want to be able to change the color of this title or change the text itself.

Well, I'll press the Spacebar to stop playback.

Usually if I want to make changes, I need to go ahead and open up this pre-composition because if I open this up here, you can see I only have Transform options.

So, what I'll do is just double click on this pre-composition which is going to open the Title_Animation comp.

Now, if I scrub through the Timeline here, you can see this is where the main animation of this graphic currently lies.

Now, I want to specify the things that I'd like to be able to change.

These will end up being Master Properties.

So, in order to do that, I need to go up to my workspaces and I'm going to go across my workspaces here and I'll click on the double white arrows and I'll go to the Essential Graphics panel.

In that panel, I need to select a composition to be my master composition, so, I'll click on that dropdown and I'll choose the Title_Animation composition to be the master and then I'll tell it to Solo Supported Properties.

Now, once I've clicked that, you'll notice I have a whole bunch of different properties that I could customize.

So, I want to be able to change the text for the location.

So here, I'm going to scroll down to where it says Norway and I'll click on Source Text and I'll drag that and drop it right up here in the Essential Graphics panel and I'll rename that Location Text.

Now, I also want to change the color of this graphic, so, I'll scroll around until I can actually see there's my Inside Frame and the Fill Color is blue so, I'll drag that color up here and I'll rename this Bar Color.

Now, any of these properties I could add here into the Essential Graphics panel, but I think I'm good for now.

Let's go to the Norway composition and you'll notice now for this pre-comp, I not only have Transform options, I also have Master Properties.

So, if I wanted this bar to be red instead of this blue color, I'll come right here to my color sampler and I'll just sample this red color.

And now, you can see it's actually more of a salmon color. but I'll leave that.

Now, I already have another composition, Canada, and if I click on this, you can see I've got my same Title_Animation here that has the same Master Properties.

So, for this one, notice I still have the original blue color that we had in our main Title_Animation comp, but I didn't have to go back to this composition to change anything because I have my Master Properties.

I can go ahead and right click here on Location Text and I can say Edit Value..., and when I do that in here, I'll type canada.

Now, notice even though I typed all lowercase, it stayed uppercase because in the master Title_Animation comp when I created the text, I made sure that all caps was on for that text.

So, I was able to change the text here, I was able to change the color here, but I never had to go back to the master composition.

By utilizing Master Properties, I was able to better manage versioning across multiple projects.