Effects and overlays

The video editor runs Bitgrain's effects on every frame: halftone, dither, ASCII, print textures, color grades and more. This page covers effect clips, keyframes, frame seeds and jitter, per-clip effects, real-time overlay effects, tracking overlays, transitions and overlay templates.

How effects work in video

There are four places an effect can live, and each behaves a little differently:

Effect clips and per-clip effects use the same engine as the image editor. Text is always drawn after effects, so titles stay sharp.

Effect clips

Adding an effect clip

• Click Effect in the action bar and pick an effect from the "Add effect" menu.
• Click Transform in the action bar for a "Zoom & Transform" clip.
• Click the plus button on an effect track's header to drop a Halftone clip onto that track.

The new clip is 5 seconds long, starts at the playhead and is selected so you can tune it straight away. The Effect and Transform buttons use the first effect track that is visible and unlocked.

Note: If there is no visible, unlocked effect track, the Effect and Transform buttons do nothing. New projects include one (called "FX"). If you removed it, add one with Add Track and pick "Effect track".

The effect inspector

Select an effect clip and the inspector lists every effect inside it, numbered in the order they run. Each card has:

• A mode picker, so you can switch the effect to any other mode (including Zoom & Transform) without deleting it.
• A reset button that puts the effect back to its default settings.
• A remove button. Removing the last effect in a clip removes the clip.
• The effect's own parameters, followed by a tone section with Brightness and Contrast (0 to 2, default 1).

Click add effect at the top of the inspector to stack another effect inside the same clip.

Stacking effects

Everything active at a given moment is combined: all effects in all overlapping effect clips on all visible effect tracks, plus the clip's own per-clip effects. They run in order, one after another.

When two stacked effects share a setting, such as Brightness or Contrast, the one that comes later wins. If you want different tone settings for two looks, put them on separate clips at different times rather than stacking them.

Character effects (ASCII and Braille) turn the frame into a grid of glyphs. If a stack contains one, the last character effect decides the grid.

Available effects

For what each effect does to an image, see dithering, halftone and print, ASCII and text textures, filters and color and creative effects.

Zoom & Transform

The Zoom & Transform mode moves the picture instead of changing its look. Its Spatial Controls are:

Motion presets animate over the length of the effect clip. See Ken Burns pan and zoom for a step by step.

Tip: A 0.2 second Transform clip at 1.06x scale makes a quick punch-in. Place one on each beat for a pulsing edit, or let beat sync do it for you.

Keyframes

Keyframes animate an effect clip over time. They start with the transform, Zoom / Scale, Rotation, Pos X and Pos Y, and any number slider on the clip can be keyframed too, such as halftone cell size or brightness. Values between keyframes are blended in a straight line. Before the first keyframe and after the last one, the value holds.

1. Select an effect clip and move the playhead to where the motion should start.
2. Click Add Keyframe in the Spatial Controls, or right-click the clip and choose Add Keyframe. This records the current scale, position and rotation at the playhead.
3. Move the playhead, then drag the sliders. Once a clip has keyframes, changing a slider writes a keyframe at the playhead instead of changing the whole clip.
4. Keyframes appear as small amber dots on the clip. Click a dot to jump the playhead to it.

To remove keyframes, park the playhead on one and right-click the clip, then choose Clear Keyframe. Keyframes also act as snapping points.

A keyframed property takes over from the motion preset for that property. For example, keyframing scale disables Zoom In on that clip, but a Pan preset still moves it sideways.

Once a clip has keyframes, moving any number slider on it writes a keyframe at the playhead, and the sliders show the animated value wherever the playhead sits. Choices that are not numbers, like a palette, a color or a mode, apply to the whole clip. If you want a fixed look with animated motion, keep the motion on its own Zoom & Transform clip.

Frame seeds and jitter

Some effects move over time: halftone and Pop Grunge dots shift, and spatter changes position. Bitgrain gives each moment its own frame seed, so these patterns move like real print or film while staying repeatable. Render the same frame twice and the seeded patterns land in the same place.

Film Grain, Grunge ASCII, Random dithering and the print finish pass are seeded too, so two exports of the same project match pixel for pixel.

The base seed changes 30 times per second. Halftone and Pop Grunge also have a Jitter box that sets how often their dot pattern shifts:

• MANUAL shows a Frequency slider from 0 to 60 hz. At 0, the dots stay perfectly still. Halftone defaults to 0 (still dots), Pop Grunge defaults to 30.
• AUTO makes the frequency follow the motion on screen, from about 4 hz when the shot is calm up to 60 hz when a lot is moving. Busy shots boil, quiet shots settle.

Auto measures motion the same way in the preview and in the MP4 export, frame by frame from the footage, so the export boils and settles where the preview does.

Preview quality versus export

The preview processes effects on a working image at most 540 pixels wide. The MP4 export treats effects in two ways so the result matches that preview:

• Smooth effects (halftone, Pop Grunge, haze and bloom, LUTs, color grade, grain, scanlines, crosshatch, misprint and the other tone and texture effects) render at full export resolution. Their size settings, such as halftone cell, Pop Grunge cell, scanline spacing and misprint shift, grow by the same ratio as the frame, so you get the same number of dots as in the preview, drawn crisp.
• Pixel and character effects (dither, ASCII, braille, dot matrix, Grunge ASCII, blocky and pixelate) render at the 540 pixel working size, then scale up with hard, nearest neighbour pixels, so the grid looks exactly as it did in the preview, just bigger.

If a clip stacks both kinds at once, the whole stack takes the second path, so the smooth effects on that clip are upscaled with the pixel ones and everything lines up. Clips with no effect, or only a transform, render at full export resolution. WebM export records the preview itself, so it matches too.

Per-clip effects

The video inspector has an Effects & Filters section with quick buttons: + Grayscale, + Invert, + Pixelate, + Grain / Noise, + ASCII Art and + Retro Dither. Each one you add shows up as a small card with an Intensity slider (0 to 2) and a trash button.

Per-clip effects only touch that clip, and they run after any effect-clip effects active at the same time. For full parameter control, use an effect clip instead.

Real-time overlay effects

Image overlay clips have a Glitch & distortion menu in their inspector. These are lightweight, animated effects drawn live on the overlay image.

Every effect has an Intensity slider (0 to 100%). The animated ones also have Speed (0 to 100%). Pick None to remove the effect. These sit alongside the overlay's CSS-style filters (Blur, Grayscale, Invert, Sepia, Hue, Saturation, Brightness, Contrast), covered on timeline and clips.

Tracking overlays

A tracking overlay draws a motion HUD: reticles that lock onto movement in your footage, follow it, and drop off when it stops, joined by lines, arrows, coordinate readouts and zoomed thumbnails.

Click Tracking in the action bar to add a 5 second clip at the playhead. It goes on the first tracking track, and a track called "Tracking" is created if you have none. The overlay reads the finished frame underneath it (video, effects and image overlays), so it follows whatever is actually on screen.

Tracking works best on footage with clear moving subjects. On a static shot, few reticles appear.

Transitions

Transitions live in the Trans tab of Templates. They work by fading clips, so they apply between the selected clip and the nearest earlier clip on the same track.

1. Select the clip that should come in.
2. Open Templates, then Trans.
3. Pick a transition. The previous clip on that track gets a fade out and the selected clip gets a fade in.

On video clips, Dip to Black and Dip to White fade the whole frame to that color and back, including anything on lower tracks. Crossfade and Soft Fade fade the clips themselves, so with two clips end to end on one track they pass through whatever is underneath, usually the black background. For a true overlap blend, put the incoming clip on a second video track, overlap the two, and fade the top one in. On text, image and tracking clips every transition is a plain fade. Fades are clamped to half of each clip's length. You can fine tune them afterwards with the fade handles or sliders, and picking Crossfade or Soft Fade later removes a dip color.

Overlay templates

The Overlays tab in Templates drops a group of timed text clips at the playhead, all on your first text track.

Each part is an ordinary text clip, so you can edit the words and styling in the text inspector.

Related

• Effects overview
• Timeline and clips
• Text and titles
• Templates
• Exporting video
• Privacy and determinism

More documentation

• All documentation
• More in video editor
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