Effects

Every effect has a page here detailing information about it. Parameter details explain each property in an effect, and almost every page has a picture comparison to allow you to view what the effect does.

For applying effects, ordering a stack and using adjustment layers, see Effects and Effect Controls.

Page information

Effect pages open explaining their purpose. Then the parameter table, and an explanation of what each control does.

A few conventions run through the whole catalogue:

• Mix appears on almost every effect. It blends the effect with the composite before the effect was applied. A Blend dropdown sits beside it with the layer blend modes. On Normal nothing changes; on any other mode the effect runs at full strength, is blended over the picture in that mode, then Mix is applied once.
• Matte and Invert appear on every effect too. A matte is an input to an effect. For example a blur driven by a matte blurs less where the matte is dark. It is not simply the same as if you could change the opacity of an effect. Some effects use the matte to drive more than just strength, in these cases the effect page explains its use.
• Distances are counted in pixels. They adapt to resizes, including exporting at a different resolution.
• Every parameter animates. Turn on its stopwatch. See Keyframes.
• Effects that require a file or another layer as input do nothing until you supply one.

Effect categories

Blur & sharpen

Soften, focus, and detail lift.

Effect	What it does
Gaussian blur	Basic, simple blur.
Directional blur	A streak along one angle, for impact frames and speed.
Radial blur	A spin or a zoom about a centre point.
Unsharp mask	A radius-controlled detail lift.
Sharpen	The simple, basic sharpen.
Depth of field	A lens blur driven by a depth pass, with a real iris.
Depth of field pro	Depth of field traced through a real lens.
Channel blur	Blurs red, green, blue and the alpha by separate amounts.
Vector blur	Streaks each pixel along directions read from a map.

Colour

Colour grading and correction.

Effect	What it does
Colour balance	Lift, gamma, and gain, for shadows, mid-tones and highlights.
Saturation	Scale how colourful the picture is, evenly.
Vibrancy	A weighted saturation lift.
Vignette	Darken toward the edges.
Exposure	Adjust exposure.
Hue shift	Only adjust hue.
Contrast	Increase or reduce contrast.
Gamma	Lift or lower mid-tones.
Temperature	Warm and cool shift.
LUT	Apply a LUT from a .cube file.
OCIO colour space transform	Convert a layer between two colour spaces of the project’s OCIO config.
OCIO display transform	Show a layer through a display and view of the project’s OCIO config.
OCIO look transform	Apply a look from the project’s OCIO config to a layer.
OCIO file transform	Apply a LUT or CDL file to a layer through the OCIO readers.
Invert	Invert an input.
Tint	Map brightness onto two colours.
Curves	Adjust the tone curve.
Levels	Adjust black point, white point and gamma.
Brightness	Brighten or darken the image.
Hue and saturation	Adjust hues, saturation, or lightness.
Posterize	Reduce the colour depth of an input.
Threshold	Values above threshold white, otherwise black.
Tritone	Map brightness onto 3 colours.
Photo filter	Warms or cools the input.
Black and white	Converts to greyscale.
Shadow highlight	Adjust shadows and highlights.

Distortion

Warps, reshapes, twists, and glitches.

Effect	What it does
RGB split	Offset the colour channels.
Chromatic aberration	Radial colour fringing.
Shake	Seeded camera wobble.
Block glitch	Tear the picture into blocks.
Scanlines	CRT line pattern.
Datamosh	Melt frames together.
Turbulent displace	Fractal warping.
Tile	Cuts a rectangle and stamps it across the frame.
Offset	Slides and wrap the picture.
Mirror	Reflects one half of the frame.
Lens distort	Bends the edges of a layer.
Corner pin	Pulls the four corners to four placed points.
Displacement map	Warps a layer’s pixels using a brightness map.
Polar coordinates	Wraps the frame around its centre.
Twirl	Wrings the picture round a point.
Spherize	Magnifies a circle of the picture.
Ripple	Rings of distortion spreading outward from a point.
Wave warp	Runs a wave across the frame.
Bezier warp	Warp with twelve draggable points.
Warp	Multiple ways of bending a picture.

Generate

Generate textures, colours, and gradients.

Effect	What it does
Fill	Replace a layer’s colour with one colour.
Gradient	A two-colour ramp across the frame.
Noise	Monochrome grain over the picture.
Fractal noise	Source for generating textures.
Beam	Draws a tapered shaft of light between two points.
Lightning	Draws a bolt of lightning between two points.
Radio waves	Emits expanding rings.
Vegas	Runs a dashed stroke along contours it finds in the picture.
Add grain	Lays film grain over the picture.
Scribble	Fills a mask with pencil strokes.
Stroke	Draws a stroke along a mask .
Particulate	A particle system: many small things born, carried about, and fading.
Grid	A lattice of points drawn as discs, or a grid of lines.
Scatter	Throws points at the picture and keeps the ones that land on something.
Emit from image	Throws points at a layer and keeps the ones that land somewhere bright.
Points along path	Evenly spaced points along one of the layer’s masks.
Text to points	Makes one point for each character, word or line of a Text layer.
Track points	Follows things in the layer’s footage and hands them out as points.
Clone to points	Stamps a layer’s picture at every point of a stream.
Trail	Draws where every point of a stream has just been.
Connect points	Joins points that are near each other with lines.
Points field	Draws a picture of where a stream’s points are, for other effects to read.
Label points	Writes a short piece of text beside every point of a stream.
Type fill	Fills the frame with rows of words that stretch to fill the room a shape leaves them.
Vary points	Makes the points of a stream differ from one another.
Pick points	Keeps some of a stream’s points and drops the rest.
Transform points	Moves, scales and turns a whole stream of points about an anchor.
Merge points	Joins up to four streams of points into one.
Relax points	Pushes a stream’s points apart until they stop overlapping.
Flow points	Carries a stream’s points along a field over time.
Bake points	Writes the points wired into it to disk and hands the written points on.

Stylise

Add elements to existing footage.

Effect	What it does
Sprite flare	A lens flare built from glows, rays, rings and ghosts, designed in its own window.
Light wrap	Spill the background’s light around a keyed subject’s edge.
Flash	A strobe on a beat.
Glow	Bloom the picture’s bright areas.
Lens flare	A flare traced through a real lens.
Lens dirt	Dust, smudges and water on the lens, lit by the bright parts of the picture.
Drop shadow	Casts a copy of the layer’s own shape behind it.
Roughen edges	Chews the outline of a shape with fractal noise.
Median	Replaces every pixel with the median value of its neighbours.
Mosaic	Cuts the frame into rectangles and paints each a single colour.
Find edges	Draws the picture as a line drawing of its edges.
Emboss	Treats the picture as a surface with height, and lights from one side.
Texturize	Use another layer as relief.
Mood lighting	Lays pools of coloured light over the picture and lifts the contrast under them.
Pixel sort	Puts runs of pixels in order along their own row or column.

Temporal

Effects that read other frames, or rely on time.

Effect	What it does
Echo	Composite a run of earlier frames for trails.
Posterize time	Hold time on a coarser time grid.
Accumulation motion blur	Re-render the scene below at sub-frame moments and average them. Slow, and correct.
Motion blur	Smear each pixel along motion in footage.

Transition

Transition between other layers.

Effect	What it does
Linear wipe	Sweeps a straight edge across the frame.
Radial wipe	Sweeps a wedge around a centre.
Venetian blinds	Closes the frame with slats.
Iris wipe	Opens a polygon from the middle of the frame.
Card wipe	Turns the frame away as a grid of cards.

Utility

Useful tools for specific tasks.

Effect	What it does
Transform	The transform properties as an effect.
Crop	Takes the picture away past four edges.
Matte key	Pull a green or blue screen to transparency, with despill.
Set matte	Takes a channel of another layer as transparency.
Set channels	Every output channel told which channel of which layer it comes from.
Broadcast safe	Measures and displays illegal pixels.
Camera track	Works out how the camera moved in a shot.
Planar track	Follows a surface, or one or two points, and moves another layer with it.
Roto brush	Cuts a subject out of a shot from a few strokes, carried frame to frame.
Depth	Reads how far away every pixel is, for other effects to use.
Remove background	Cuts a subject out of a shot with a trained model, a frame at a time.
Custom shader	An effect you write yourself, as WGSL text or a graph of boxes.
Extract channels	Reads channels an OpenEXR file holds beyond its RGB into the layer’s red, green, blue and alpha.
Node graph	Applies a node graph composition to the layer, with the graph’s Inputs as its rows.

Compositing

The boxes only a node graph composition can hold: they join, pick between, or shift pictures that arrive on wires. See node graph compositions.

Effect	What it does
Merge	Lays one picture over another with a blend mode and an opacity.
Switch	Shows one of its input pictures, picked by Index.
Time offset	Shows its input at another time.
Split channels	Hands out a picture’s red, green, blue and alpha as four greyscale pictures.
Combine channels	Builds one picture from four greyscale pictures, one per channel.
Repeat start	Marks where the boxes that run several times begin.
Repeat end	Runs the boxes between it and its Repeat start several times.

Controls

Values for expressions to read.

Effect	What it does
Slider control	A number for expressions to read.
Angle control	An angle for expressions to read.
Checkbox control	An on/off switch for expressions to read.
Colour control	A colour for expressions to read.
Point control	A position for expressions to read.
Custom controls	A named set of controls for expressions to read.

Drivers

Values that other effects follow, wired up rather than keyframed.

A driver makes a number, a colour or a stream of points instead of a picture. Run a wire from its socket into another effect’s parameter and that parameter follows the wire instead of its own keyframes; bypass the driver and the keyframes come back.

A driver is wired on a layer’s own graph, see The node graph, or inside a node graph composition.

Effect	What it does
Wiggle	A number that wobbles, for anything that should not sit still.
Audio level	How loud the composition, a layer or a clip is, as a number.
Colour cycle	A colour that turns through the hue wheel.
Math	Two numbers and one arithmetic sign.
Remap	One range of numbers into another.
Smooth	Takes the jitter off whatever feeds it.
Split	A colour taken apart into its four numbers.
Combine	Four numbers put together as a colour.
Points sample	Turns a stream of points into numbers you can drive things with.
Layer points	Brings another layer’s points into this layer’s graph.
Expression	Hands out whatever an expression returns: a number, a point or a colour.
Clone index	Tells a layer which copy Clone to points is stamping it as.
Measure	The size and edges of a layer’s content, as numbers.
Beat trigger	Turns beats and loud moments into events other effects react to.

Audio

Effects that change a layer’s sound. They draw nothing.

Effect	What it does
Gain	Turns a layer’s sound up or down, each side on its own, and can flip its polarity.
Stereo width	Narrows or widens the stereo picture, moves it left or right, and folds the bass to the middle.
Parametric EQ	Five filters in a row, each a bell, a shelf, a pass or a notch.
Graphic EQ	Ten octave bands, one gain each.
Compressor	Turns down whatever is louder than a threshold.
Limiter	Holds the sound under a ceiling.
Gate	Turns down whatever is quieter than a threshold.
Distortion	Bends or coarsens a waveform: soft clip, hard clip, foldback, bit crush or rate reduce.
Delay	Repeats the sound after a set time, each repeat quieter and duller.
Reverb	A room’s reflections added to the sound.
Chorus	Copies of the sound with a delay that will not sit still: a chorus or a flanger.
Phaser	A row of notches swept up and down the sound.
Tremolo	The level moved up and down by an oscillator, or the sound panned side to side.
Vibrato	The pitch moved up and down by an oscillator.
Wah	A narrow band of the sound swept up and down, by an oscillator or by the sound’s own level.

Siceliot

Drivers in the manner of Cavalry’s behaviours, which give each copy Clone to points stamps its own value. The heading is the name of the set they came from.

Effect	What it does
Stagger	A value that steps from Minimum on the first copy to Maximum on the last.
Random	A random value for each copy, kept or rolled again a set number of times a second.
Oscillator	A value that swings between two numbers in a wave, rippling across the copies.
Value noise	A value that wanders smoothly between two numbers, differently for each copy.
Ring wave	Rings that grow out across the frame and give each point a value as they cross it.