Effects and transitions

76 filters, 88 entrances and exits and 8 sound effects — 172 in all, every one of them free, running on your graphics card, stackable as deep as you like and keyframable to the last control.

The rack

Select a clip and the Inspector shows its rack: the clip's own base item pinned at the top, and every effect added to it stacked below in processing order. That order is the order the shaders run in, so dragging a row up or down changes the picture.

The base item is per channel. A video clip gets its transform, an audio clip gets its levels — which is why sound needs no separate inspector tab — and a title gets both the transform and, above it, the words and the type.

One row, with everything on it. Left to right: the eye, which keyframes; the effect's name; its blend mode; the row's own opacity; and the matte switch, which cuts this row's result with the row above it.

The eye: Switches a row off without losing it, and keyframes — so an effect can come on part-way through a clip.
Blend mode: How this row's result reaches the picture that entered it. Normal is a replacement; screen, multiply, overlay and the rest are the usual set.
Row opacity: How much of the result to mix back in. A blur at 40% is a soft-focus diffusion rather than a blur.
Matte: Uses the row above as a per-pixel mask on this one, so an effect can be confined to a shape without a second clip.
Parameters: Drag the label to scrub, or click and type. Every one carries a diamond and a tangent button.

Finding an effect

⌘/Ctrl + E opens the palette on the selected clip. The shelves run down the left with their counts, the grid on the right shows what each effect does, and the search box has the focus the moment it opens.

Each tile is the real effect running on the frame you are looking at, not an illustration. Point at one and the clip plays through it — transitions loop their window, filters wipe the untouched picture back in under the pointer.

The shelves matter as much as the search. You cannot search for a thing you do not know is there, and half the catalogue is entrances and exits whose names are near-synonyms — slide, push, whip, wipe. A picture of the motion is the only handle that works.

The filter shelves

Blur 4: Gaussian Blur, Fast Box Blur, Camera Lens Blur, Radial Blur
Keying 9: Chroma Key, Color Difference Key, Color Range, Linear Color Key, Extract, Key Cleaner, Advanced Spill Suppressor, Linear Color Spill Suppressor, Wire Removal
Matte 4: Simple Choker, Matte Choker, Refine Hard Matte, Refine Soft Matte
Color 7: Levels, Exposure, Gamma/Pedestal/Gain, Color Balance, Color Balance (HLS), Hue/Saturation, Vibrance
Toning 6: Black & White, Change Color, Change To Color, Tint, CC Toner, Colorama
Stylize 8: Posterize, Crop, Mosaic, Find Edges, Cartoon, Glow, Roughen Edges, Vignette
Distort 14: Transform, Corner Pin, Bezier Warp, Warp, Optics Compensation, Spherize, Bulge, Magnify, Twirl, Ripple, Turbulent Displace, Smear, Mirror, Polar Coordinates
Generate 17: Fill, Gradient Ramp, 4-Color Gradient, Checkerboard, Grid, Circle, Ellipse, Cell Pattern, Fractal Noise, Lens Flare, Beam, Lightning, Radio Waves, Scribble, Outline, Audio Spectrum, Audio Waveform
Motion 2: Stabilize Position, Stabilize Position, Scale & Rotation
Time 5: Shutter Blur, Echo, Posterize Time, Time Displacement, Time Difference

Entrances and exits

A timed effect plays over a window at one end of a clip rather than over all of it. It belongs to the clip, so it moves and trims with it, and its length is a number in the rack and a strip you can drag on the timeline — the two always agree, because one module decides where the window is.

Basic 12: Fade, cut, pop, zoom
Directional 16: Slide and fly, any side
Scale 9: Grow, collapse, bounce
Rotation 10: Spin, swing, flip
Blur & motion 8: Smear and defocus
Camera 7: Push, pull, dolly
Dynamic 10: Flash, glitch, shake
Reveal 16: Wipes, irises, curtains

Transitions between two shots

Different thing, despite the name. An entrance is a function of one picture; a transition is a function of two, so it is a clip of its own on a transition lane rather than a row on either shot's rack.

The lane sits under the video track it plays over. u_from is the composite as it stands under the lane; u_to is that same composite with the clip above drawn over it — so at the end of the window the transition is showing exactly the frame the editor would have drawn without it.

Drag a tile from the Transitions tab onto a lane, or onto the video track it should play over, and it routes to the lane touching it.
Clicking a tile puts one at the playhead, making the lane if there isn't one. With a transition clip selected, clicking swaps that one instead of placing a second.
Transitions run in composition space — the project canvas, after every clip's transform — which is why a slide really does leave the screen rather than sliding out of a layer's box.
Their settings are static rather than keyframed. A transition is over in a fraction of a second, and a curve across one would be a shape nobody could see the middle of.

Track mattes

The other way to cut one picture to the shape of another, and the one to reach for when the shape is a whole layer rather than a row of a rack. Switch a track to matte and it stops drawing: instead it cuts the tracks below it — as many as you say — to its own shape.

An alphamatte cuts on the matte layer's transparency; a luma matte cuts on its brightness. Luma is the reading the interesting case needs: a solid carrying Fractal Noise has its shape in brightness and nothing at all in alpha.

The reach is stored on the matte track as a number of tracks downward, which means a mask group is always contiguous. A stack composites in order, so masking lanes 1 and 3 but not 2 is not a picture anyone can draw.

Green screen

Nine keyers and four matte tools. A key is a chain rather than one slider: the keyer decides where the edge falls, Key Cleaner decides what the edge looks like, and the spill suppressors deal with the light that bounced off the screen onto your subject — which no matte can fix, because it is in the picture rather than in the alpha.

The plate as shot, the matte pulled from it, and the composite. The middle frame is a keyer's actual output — a greyscale statement about which pixels survive — and it is what every other tool on the shelf operates on.

Chroma Key: The one to start with. Measures hue against the screen colour and answers linearly, which is what keeps a soft edge soft. Carries its own spill control.
Color Difference Key: Two mattes — green over red, green over blue — levelled separately, so a pixel has to look like the screen against both. Wins on a yellow or a cyan that fools one of them.
Color Range: Brightness and hue on separate tolerances. For removing an object rather than a backing: a grey sky but not the grey road.
Linear Color Key: Straight RGB distance from one colour. Blunt on footage, exact on a graphic, and useful last in the rack pointed at whatever another keyer left behind.
Extract: Keys on brightness alone. Smoke against black, a flame, white text off a page — footage where the subject is the luminance and there is no screen to sample.
Key Cleaner: Reads alpha, writes alpha, leaves the picture alone. Choke, soften, steepen, and average the matte across frames so it stops flickering on grain.
Spill suppressors: Two of them. Both subtract the screen's hue out of skin and hair without draining the colour underneath; the linear one has nothing to tune and keyframes in a straight line.
Wire Removal: Two keyframeable handles mark a rig wire and the picture is walked across it. Invisible against sky; a smear against detail.

Stabilisation

The one effect that has to measure the clip before it can run, so its rack row starts a job rather than editing a number. It decodes the shot, tracks features from frame to frame, fits a camera path through them and keeps that measurement.

Stabilising is not removing motion — a shot with every trace of movement taken out looks like a still with things happening in it. It replaces the path the camera took with a smoother one that goes to the same places, and pushes the frame in to buy the room to do it.

Smoothness is a live slider, not a re-analysis: the measurement is expensive and fixed, and the correction is derived from it cheaply every time you drag.
Max crop is the ceiling on how far in the frame may be pushed. Set it low and a violent shot will be told it wanted more room than it was allowed rather than silently cropping to nothing.
The measurement is stored against the file, not the clip, so splitting a stabilised shot, dropping a second copy of the same footage, or undoing and asking again all reuse it. Nothing is decoded twice.
It runs off the main thread, so the preview keeps playing and the timeline keeps editing while it works.

Generators, and effects that read something else

A few effects need an input a number cannot express, and the rack offers the right control for each because the effect declared what it needs — not because the rack knows its name.

An audio track: Audio Spectrum and Audio Waveform draw what a track is playing. Only audio tracks are offered, because a video track's clips are picture-only.
A drawn path: Effects that follow geometry ask which shape layer and which path on it. The shapes offered are the ones on the clip under the playhead — the same clip the effect will resolve against when it renders.
A measurement: The stabilisers. The row is a verb: analyse, watch the progress, then tune.

Generators — Fill, Gradient Ramp, Fractal Noise, Lens Flare, Lightning, Checkerboard and the rest — draw rather than filter, so they are usually put on a solid or a shape layer. See The canvas.

Recently used

The effects you last reached for sit at the top of the palette. That is a fact about you rather than about the cut, so it survives opening a different project and never turns up in undo or in a saved file.