Halfway through a film the canvas holds dozens of nodes. In DOTV, groups are how you collect them into one stretch of pipeline: fence off the storyboard images, the dubs and the finished cuts each on their own, then move a whole stretch at once, run it at once, save it as a template at once — and your AI video pipeline becomes something you can reuse. This section covers fencing them in, adding and removing, merging groups into one, and the difference between ungrouping and deleting.
Marquee-select, or hold ⇧ and click, two or more nodes, then press ⌘G (or hit Group on the toolbar that floats up over a selection).
What you get is a translucent bed with its name floating in the top-left corner; double-click the name to rename it. What a group looks like and what the buttons on its toolbar do is 2.3.
In and out use the same test: is the node's center inside the group's box or outside it, judged the moment you let go. So there is no vague middle zone where a node is neither in nor out.
Groups cannot nest. Whichever route you take, a selection that already contains a group merges into it rather than wrapping another layer around it — Run group, Ungroup and the rest all count one layer of group, and nesting would make them ambiguous.
Drag the last node out of a plain group and the emptied container goes with it (an empty gray bed is no use to anyone). Grid groups are the exception: empty cells are a normal state there, so the container stays and waits for you to fill it.
Select two or more groups and press ⌘⌥G (the shortcuts panel calls it Merge shot groups — shot groups are what people merge most). They fold into the first group, the swallowed containers disappear, and no child node moves an inch. Loose nodes caught in the selection come along too.
⌘G also merges when the selection contains a group. The difference is that ⌘⌥G only merges: with fewer than two groups selected it does nothing but say so, and never conjures up a new group.
Deleting a group deletes the nodes inside it. Use Ungroup if you want to keep the contents. And if you really did delete the wrong thing, there is always ⌘Z.
| What you want | How | Result |
|---|---|---|
| Just remove the group layer | Ungroup on the toolbar, or ⌘⇧G | The nodes go back on the canvas, nothing lost |
| Delete the contents along with it | Select the group and press ⌫ | The group and every node in it are gone |