Effects

Finding an effect in the palette, dragging it onto a shot or onto filler, and where the editor is.

Two panels, because finding an effect and editing one are different jobs.

• Effect Palette — every effect there is, in a list, grouped by what it does.
• Effect Editor — what is on this shot, and its parameters.

Putting an effect on a shot

Drag it out of the palette and drop it on the shot. While you drag, the timeline outlines what will happen: a solid outline round a shot means the effect goes on that shot.

Clicking a row in the palette does the same thing to the shot the Effect Editor is pointing at — the one selected, or the one under the position indicator. The palette says which shot that is, at the bottom, so a click is never a guess.

Putting an effect on filler

Drop it on empty track space above the cut and it becomes filler carrying that effect, which grades everything on the tracks below it for as long as the filler runs. The outline is dashed and says grades everything below, because that is a different thing from grading one shot.

This is how a scene gets graded: no shot owns a scene, so there is nowhere else to put it. Avid calls it putting an effect on filler; Premiere calls it an adjustment layer.

It behaves the same in the monitor and in the master — the renderer grades the composited picture for exactly the filler's span, measured against real ffmpeg rather than assumed.

Two things it will not do, and says so rather than doing them quietly:

• A masked effect on filler is not rendered — put it on the shot instead.
• A transform on filler moves nothing: it has no picture of its own to move.

Where the Effect Editor is

• It opens when you drop an effect.
• Double-click a shot that carries an effect — the whole shot is the target, not a small icon.
• A shot carrying effects wears a small dot at its head, so a timeline can be scanned for them.

A shot with nothing on it says where the palette is and opens it.

Saving a stack as a template

Spent ten minutes on a grade and want it on the rest of the scene? Save as template… at the top of the Effect Editor puts that whole stack in the palette under a name, for everybody on the show — the palette lists them first, under Saved on this show.

Drag one onto a shot, or onto filler, exactly like a built-in effect. Right-click a template to delete it.

Each use gets its own copy of the effects: two shots carrying the same template are two stacks, so changing the grade on one does not change the other. A template is a starting point, not a link.

Saving under a name that already exists replaces it — saving Interview grade twice means the second one, and a palette with two rows of the same name is a guessing game.

The controls

A slider is the right control for one number along a range — a blur radius, an opacity — and the wrong one for almost everything a grade is made of. So:

None of these is a new parameter and none of them is a mode. Each one reads and writes the effect's own numbers, which are still there under Numbers: fold it open to type an exact value, to keyframe one channel on its own, or to read what a wheel actually did. A control that hides the parameter it writes is one you cannot check.

The wheel's travel is the parameters' own range, so the edge of the wheel is exactly as far as the slider goes — a wheel can reach everything the numbers can, and never asks for a value they cannot hold. Dragging the ball never changes the level: that is the slider's job, and a trackball that nudged the exposure as you warmed the shadows would be a control nobody could use twice.

Double-click any of them to put it back: the wheel to centre, the pad to the middle of frame, the dial to level, a slider to its default.

Categories

The palette groups by what an effect does, which is not the order the stack applies them in:

You reason about the category when hunting for an effect, and about the stack order when two effects are on one shot. They are different questions, so they are different lists.

Limiting an effect to a shape, and tracking it

Blur, Mosaic, Curves, the Qualifier, Spot Colour and Color Correction can be limited to a rectangle or an ellipse: Limit to, then the shape's position, size, rotation and feather. Everything above it in the effect still applies to the whole shot; the limited one applies inside the shape.

Track follows the shape from the playhead to the end of the shot. Park on the frame where you can see the thing, put the shape on it, and press Track — the keyframes it writes are ordinary mask keyframes you can see, drag and undo. It starts from the playhead rather than the head of the shot because that is the frame somebody actually looked at.

Stabilise is the same walk pointed at a different question. Nobody picks the anchor: it chooses the most trackable patch in the first frame, and refuses by name if there is nothing to lock onto, because a stabiliser that wandered off is worse than one that declined. The answer is Transform position keyframes — again, ordinary ones.

What renders

A tracked mask and a stabilised shot render exactly, per frame, where the monitor showed them. This matters most for the one effect where it is not a cosmetic question: a mosaic over somebody's face is compliance, and until 2026-10-01 the render held every keyframed parameter at its mid-point value, which put the mosaic beside the face for all but one frame of the shot.

What still flattens to a mid-point value is any parameter ffmpeg will not animate — a blur radius, a gamma, a key's tolerance — and a mask whose size or rotation is keyframed rather than its position. Those are listed by name in the export's report, so you know which of the monitor and the master is the approximation rather than having to compare them frame by frame.