3D Compositing with Action > Action: Surfaces >

# About Surfaces

You use surfaces to display media in the scene and then composite front and matte clips with a common back clip.

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

A surface is used to place a media in the scene. To use media that you load from the EditDesk, you must add a surface to the scene for that media. A surface has the following characteristics:

- A surface type can be flat, bilinear, bicubic, or extended bicubic.
- The same media can be applied to multiple surfaces. Any cropping, blurring, or recolouring that you apply to one media is applied to all the surfaces for that media. For example, if you blur a media, all of the surfaces using that media are blurred.