You should have a working understanding of Action media and the relationship between media and surfaces to be successful in using Action. Media has the following characteristics:

• Each front and matte clip combination that you load from the Desktop or clip library is called media.
• The clips you load into Action are listed in the Media list.
• When you first open Action, you load the front clip and matte clip for the first media and a common back clip for all media.
• Media must have a front and matte of the same resolution, but each media can have a different resolution from the other.
• You can work with front only or matte only media. In this case, the empty front or matte is replaced with an internal white frame of the same resolution.
• The same media can be applied to multiple surfaces. Any cropping, blurring, or recolouring that you apply to one instance of media is applied to all the surfaces for that media. For example, if you blur media, all of the surfaces using that media are blurred.