Add an effect
- Select a clip, or an adjustment layer to affect everything beneath it.
- Open the Effects panel and choose Add effect. Type to search effects and saved presets by name or description.
- Choose an effect. Its controls appear in the stack, and every one of them can be keyed.
- Color adjustment
- Exposure in stops, Contrast around middle grey, and Saturation.
- Tint
- Mixes a chosen colour into the image by an Amount, keeping its transparency.
- Invert
- Inverts the colours by an adjustable Amount.
- Pixelate
- Groups pixels into blocks, with Block size measured in composition pixels.
Start with one effect and look at it on a few representative frames before stacking more.
Order, duplicate and remove effects
Effects process from top to bottom. Use Move earlier and Move later to change the order, which matters: Pixelate followed by Tint tints the blocks, while Tint followed by Pixelate blocks the tinted image. Turn an effect off with Enabled to compare the image with and without it. Duplicate effect copies an effect with its current settings, and Remove effect deletes it.
Some treatments Ape builds read from more than one layer. Those appear as a connected set of effects rather than a simple stack, and their order follows their connections.
Save and reuse a preset
- Set up the effect the way you want it.
- Choose Save as effect preset… and give it a name that says what it is for, such as "Night exterior grade".
- To apply it, select another clip and choose the preset under Project presets, or search for it by name in Add effect.
A preset adds an ordinary effect with the saved settings, so you can adjust it for each shot. Presets belong to the project they were saved in. Use Rename… or Delete in Manage saved presets to keep the list tidy.
Animate an effect
Effect controls have the same key buttons as any other property. Key them in Properties, then shape the timing in Animate. A short change usually reads better than a treatment held at full strength for the whole shot.
A numeric effect control can also follow another one through a live driver.
Effects that Ape builds
Ape can build treatments that aren't in the Add effect list, each with named controls in Properties that you can key and adjust afterwards. Describe the result and the controls you want to change, for example "a glitch on the cut at 0:12, strong for four frames, with a control for intensity".
- Colour and light
- Channel offset for colour fringing, an inverted duotone, a flash frame, and a spotlight that dims everything outside an adjustable ellipse.
- Motion and time
- Directional smear, temporal echo trails, and a glitch treatment.
- Distortion
- Displacement from a map, and a hinge bend that folds part of the image around an axis.
- Breaking apart
- Fragment shatter, particle dissolve, and a stroke reveal.
- Particles
- An emitter with rate, lifetime, velocity, gravity, drag, size, colour and a seed, for dust, sparks or snow.
- Mattes
- Refine or combine mattes, for example to tighten a roto edge before compositing.
- Depth
- Depth-aware focus, depth parallax and text placed behind a subject. These need a depth model added in Settings > Models.
Ape can also write a treatment from scratch in GLSL or Python when none of these fit.
Write your own effect
A custom effect is a short GLSL function or a Python function, with inputs and parameters you define. The parameters become controls in Properties, like any built-in effect. See the shader reference and the Python frame effect reference. For animation driven by rules rather than pixels, see property scripts.