Effects & Masks

Every visual clip can carry a stack of effects. Effects are reordered, disabled, and layered freely. This page covers the effect stack, the individual effects, chroma key, masks, and content-aware cleanup.

The effect stack

The Effect stack section of the inspector lists every effect that can be applied to the selected clip, in order. By default the order matches the color pipeline order described in the Color grading page.

Drag a row up or down to reorder it.
Use the small ▲ and ▼ buttons on each row for keyboard-accessible reordering.
Uncheck the checkbox to the left of a row to disable just that effect for that clip.
Click the → arrow to jump to the section of the inspector that actually contains that effect's sliders.

Effect order matters. Blur applied before color grade looks different from blur applied after. The stack lets you put each effect where it makes sense for that shot.

Blur, vignette, and grain

These three live in the Effects section of the inspector.

Blur - a Gaussian blur from 0 to 20 pixels. Applies to the whole clip frame. Useful for backgrounds behind titles or for defocusing a shot.
Vignette - a darkening that fades in from the edges toward the corners. Strength from 0% to 100%. Helps pull attention to the centre of the frame.
Grain - an animated film grain overlay. Intensity from 0% to 100%. Applied as an overlay blend so it responds to the underlying brightness.

Detail enhance

Detail enhance is a mild unsharp mask. It boosts local contrast on edges, which makes footage look crisper without introducing a halo. Intensity from 0% to 100%. The default of 0% leaves the frame untouched.

Detail enhance is useful on footage that has been scaled down, because downscaling softens edges. On native-resolution footage it is rarely needed.

Blend modes

The Composite section of the inspector controls how the clip is blended with the layers beneath it. Twelve modes are available: Normal, Multiply, Screen, Overlay, Darken, Lighten, Color Dodge, Color Burn, Hard Light, Soft Light, Difference, and Exclusion.

Normal draws the clip over everything below. The other modes combine the clip's pixels with the underlying layer using standard Photoshop-style blending math. Multiply, Screen, and Overlay are the most commonly used.

Chroma key

Chroma key removes a chosen color from the clip, making those pixels transparent so a lower layer shows through. It lives in the Chroma key section of the inspector.

Enable chroma key - turns the key on or off for this clip.
Key color - the color to remove. Defaults to a bright green.
Auto-detect color - samples the four corners of the current frame and averages them, then uses that as the key color. Ideal for green-screen footage that fills the whole frame.
Tolerance - how much color distance from the key color still counts as part of the key. 0% removes only exact matches, 100% removes almost everything.
Spill - reduces the fringe of key color that bleeds onto the subject's edges. Higher values remove more spill.
Edge - softens the transition between keyed and unkeyed pixels. Higher values produce a smoother cutout at the cost of slight transparency in the subject.

The key is computed in RGB space, which works well for green and blue screens. It will struggle with key colors that are similar to skin, sky, or foliage.

Masks

Masks restrict the clip to a shape. Anything outside the mask is hidden. The Masks section of the inspector holds a list of masks for the current clip. Up to 8 masks can be stacked per clip.

Click Rectangle or Ellipse to add a mask. Each mask appears as a small panel with the following controls:

X and Y - position of the mask within the frame, as a percentage of the frame size.
W and H - size of the mask, as a percentage of the frame size.
Feather - edge softness in pixels. 0 is a hard edge, 200 is very soft.
Invert - flips the mask, so the outside is shown instead of the inside.

Masks are combined like this: all non-inverted masks are unioned together, then all inverted masks are subtracted from the result. That way a clip with one rectangle and one inverted ellipse shows the rectangle minus the ellipse area.

Masks and blending When a clip has a mask, it is automatically rendered through the layer pipeline, which means blend mode, chroma key, and any advanced color feature all run together with the mask in a single pass.

Content-aware cleanup

Content-aware cleanup removes a moving object from a shot by replacing it with pixels sampled from the surrounding frames.

Select a video clip and open the Content-aware cleanup section of the inspector.
Click Add cleanup region. The preview enters cleanup mode.
Drag a rectangle over the object in the preview.
Click Remove object. Evidor samples 20 frames around the current playhead and computes a median background for the region.

The median is baked into a small patch, which is then drawn over the region whenever the playhead is inside the cleanup time window. The window extends about 2 seconds before and after the playhead at the moment you clicked the button.

Cleanup works best when the object moves and the background is stable. It does not work when the object is stationary or when the background is also moving in the same direction. In those cases, the sampled patch will contain the object itself.

Regions are listed under the section header. Click the small × to remove one. Each clip can hold up to 16 cleanup regions.

Adjustment layers

An adjustment layer is a clip with no visual content of its own. Instead, whatever effect stack you apply to it also applies to every clip rendered below it on the timeline for the duration of the adjustment layer.

Add one from the Add track menu, then position it in the timeline and open its Color, Effects, or Composite sections in the inspector. Anything you set there will affect every clip underneath. This is a fast way to apply a look across a whole sequence without copying settings onto each clip.

Effect performance

The most expensive effects are blur, detail enhance, chroma key, and content-aware cleanup. Blur in particular causes the entire frame to be re-rendered through the layer pipeline, which means playback may stutter on lower-end machines if several clips use it at once. When that happens, disable the effect while editing and re-enable it before export.