Effects and color

A raw shot is never a finished shot. The camera just records what it saw: the colour runs a little cold, the contrast is flat, there's no mood. Working on colour is the step that takes a video from “recorded” to “made”.

The studio gives you three different tools, and they are not the same thing: effects (they deliberately mess with the picture — glitch, VHS, neon), colour correction (grading — brightness, contrast, hue) and chroma key (which removes the background outright). We'll take all three in turn.

The 70 visual effects

An effect covers the whole clip and animates over time (glitch jumps at random, a light leak drifts across the frame). It applies equally to video, images, text and stickers — this isn't a static filter, it's a pass over the drawn layer.

1. 1

   Select the clip

   Click the clip in the timeline. An “Effect” section appears in the properties panel on the right.

2. 2

   Add the effect

   Press “+ Add effect” and pick from the list. Or drag an effect straight from the effects panel onto the clip.

3. 3

   Dial in the intensity

   Every effect has an “Intensity” slider. Most of them are far too much at full strength — 20–40% is usually plenty, and looks far more convincing.

Colour grading

Grading means steering the colour and light of a shot. Unlike an effect it doesn't distort anything — it just brings the picture to where it should have been (or to the mood you want). You'll find it under “Colour and blur” in the inspector.

• Brightness — lifts or lowers the whole picture. Only add what's missing; too much burns out the highlights, and they don't come back.
• Contrast — the gap between the darks and the lights. Raise it and the shot gets punchy; lower it and it goes soft and hazy.
• Saturation — how rich the colours are. 0 is fully grey, 1 is untouched. A nudge to 1.05–1.2 is normally enough; above 1.5 skin tones go orange.
• Hue — rotates the whole colour wheel. Stay in small numbers: −10° cools a shot down, +10° warms it up.
• Blur — softens the picture. Useful on background layers, or under text to make it readable.
• Tone — looks you can't reach with the plain sliders: sepia (an old brown photo), noir (hard black-and-white), cinematic (cool shadows with warm skin).

Presets

Grading every clip by hand is tedious. The 9 built-in presets set every slider in one click: Bright, Cool, Warm, Soft, B&W, Sepia, Noir, Cinematic, Vintage. The sliders stay live afterwards — treat a preset as a starting point, not a verdict.

Chroma key — the green screen

Chroma key means deleting one colour outright. Someone talks in front of a green cloth, you erase the green, and behind them you put whatever you like — a video, an image, a map. Why green? Because it's the colour furthest from human skin: it won't accidentally eat someone's face or hair.

1. 1

   Set up the background track

   Put the green-screen clip on the upper track and the background (the new image or video) on the track below. When the green is removed from the top layer, the one beneath shows through the hole. If there's no track for it, add a new video track in the timeline.

2. 2

   Pick the colour

   Select the top clip, switch on “Chroma key” in the inspector and set “Key colour” to the actual colour of your cloth.

3. 3

   Tune the similarity

   Similarity decides how close to your colour a pixel has to be to get erased. Too low and green patches survive. Too high and your subject starts disappearing too. Raise it slowly until the green is gone, then stop immediately.

4. 4

   Soften the edge

   Edge softness adds a half-transparent band around the cut-out. A little makes the edge look natural; too much starts nibbling away at your subject's outline.

The order that works

Here's the working order — and it isn't arbitrary, it's exactly the order the studio computes in:

1. 1

   1. Chroma key

   Remove the background first. The key is clean on raw pixels: if you've already shifted the colour (boosted saturation, say), your green is no longer quite the green you picked, and the cut-out gets dirty.

2. 2

   2. Colour

   With the background gone, match the two layers to each other: pull your subject's colour towards the mood of the new background. Otherwise the composite looks pasted together.

3. 3

   3. Blur and effects

   Blur comes last. It softens the picture, so grading or keying after it is a losing game. Style effects go last too — they sit on top of the finished frame.

Once for the whole track

Applying the same look to twenty clips by hand is a waste of a life. Open “Track effects” from the menu next to the track's name: whatever effect, colour or audio effect you set there applies to every clip on that track. Drop in a new clip later and it inherits the look automatically.

Common questions