2.2.2. Effects

Effects are mostly added with the Add menu or the shortcut Shft-A. Figure 1 shows the Add menu with its submenus expanded. Effects can also be added to a strip with Modifiers (Sidepanel > Modifiers). The rightmost panel of figure 1 shows the expanded list of all available modifiers. Effects can also be added through the use of other editors. For example, the Fade effect is just an animation of the Opacity attribute of a strip and can be finetuned in the Dope Sheet editor.

Adding special effects

Figure 1: Adding effects via the menu

In this section, we describe Effects in a more generic way, distinguishing between:

  • Animation: most properties of a strip; e.g. Position, Scale, Rotation, … can be animated over time. Effects such as zooming, fading, shaking, … can be created through manipulating these attributes.

  • Transition: a project’s timeline contains multiple strips. The transition between these strips can be abrupt (direct cut) or there can be some interaction between the two clips, for example they can dissolve into each other or the second strip can wipe out the first one.

  • Masking: sometimes, you only need a portion of a strip image; e.g. a face. With masking, you can isolate that area and apply some effects on it.

  • Speed: slow-motion, fast-forwarding, freeze are typical effects that you can apply to enhance the rhythm of your movie.