Bake points

Bake points is a Generate effect.

OriginalBake points

What it does

Reads the stream on its Points socket and hands it on from its own Points socket, drawn as discs. Press Bake and the stream is written to disk for every frame of the layer. Mode says which is handed on afterwards, the baked stream or the live one.

A baked stream can be read anywhere a stream can. Points sample and Layer points read it even where they cannot read the live one: the points of Scatter, Emit from image and Text to points, and those of a Vary points or Pick points that reads a picture.

A bake records what it was made from: the effects above it on the layer and their keyframes, the wires and drivers that feed them, the layer’s masks, its text or its source, every layer those effects name, and the composition’s size, frame rate and length. After a change to any of these the bake is stale, and Auto hands on the live stream until it is baked again. Moving the layer keeps a bake.

The bake is kept in Lumit’s cache on this machine and not in the project file. On another machine it has to be baked again.

What a bake does not hold

• A change to a media file on disk, to a composition nested deeper than the layer’s own source, to the clips of a Sequence layer, to the source of a layer the effects name, to a layer an expression reads, or to what an adjustment layer sees beneath it does not make a bake stale.
• A bake holds up to 20,000 frames, 100,000 points in a frame and 160 MB over all its frames. Past any of these it stops early, and the frames after it are not baked.
• Baked points hold still within a frame, and accumulation motion blur does not smear them.

Parameters

Parameter	Control	Range	Default	Unit
Mode	Dropdown	Auto · Read · Bypass	Auto	-
Bake	Button	-	-	-
Cancel	Button	-	-	-
Feather	Slider	0 to 100	100	Per cent
Mix	Slider	0 to 100	100	Per cent
Blend	Dropdown	Normal · Darken · Multiply · Colour burn · Linear burn · Darker colour · Add · Lighten · Screen · Colour dodge · Lighter colour · Overlay · Soft light · Hard light · Linear light · Vivid light · Pin light · Hard mix · Difference · Exclusion · Subtract · Divide · Hue · Saturation · Colour · Luminosity	Normal	-
Matte	Layer	Any layer in the composition	None	-
Invert	Checkbox	On or off	Off	-
Channel	Dropdown	Luminance · Alpha · Red · Green · Blue	Luminance	-

In the Effect Controls panel:

• Point groups Feather.
• Matte is an input to an effect, scaling the strength. Invert inverts the mattes for calculating strength.

What each control does

• Mode: which stream is handed on. Auto is the bake while it matches what it was made from, and the live stream otherwise. Read is the bake whatever has changed since, and no points on a frame that is not baked. Bypass is always the live stream.
• Bake: write the stream to disk for every frame of the layer. It replaces the bake before.
• Cancel: stop a bake that is running. The bake before it is kept.
• Feather: how soft the edge of a drawn disc is.
• Mix: how much of the drawing lands on the picture. At nought the points are still handed on.
• Matte and Invert drive the strength of the effect from another layer’s brightness. See Effects.

Related

• Scatter
• Emit from image
• Points sample
• Layer points
• The node graph
• Generate
• Effects