Timeline FX: Basics

In the previous video, you learned how to apply and work with transitions at a cut between two shots.
Now let’s step this up a level and start looking at applying effects directly onto segments in the sequence.
We’ll first start off with learning how to apply them, using some of the tools, the effects editors
and rendering your effects.
First start off by selecting your segment in the sequence.
You can apply a timeline effect one of two ways.
You can right-click on the segment and choose ADD EFFECT, or you can click the FX button in the toolbar.
Both of these actions bring up the FX ribbon and you can choose the effect you want to apply to the segment.
Say for instance, I choose an axis Timeline FX.
The toolbar above the sequence now displays an FX pipeline for the segment as well as some basic parameters
for the applied timeline FX.
The FX pipeline reads from left to right.
First you have your media that is fed into an axis effect that eventually creates a result.
The more effects you add onto the segment, the longer the FX pipeline.
One point to mention is that if I call up the FX ribbon, you will be able to see the order in which timeline FX
will be applied to the segment.
In other applications, this might be called the render order.
With the exception of ConnectFX, a segment will always first be affected by a time-warp
followed by a resize and going all the way to the right to the last timeline FX, Axis.
This pipeline order cannot be changed in its current state. That is where ConnectFX comes in
which you’ll see in a later video.
Beneath the FX pipeline is the basic parameters for the applied axis timeline FX for quick adjustments.
If you have more than one timeline FX applied to a segment, you can click the relevant timeline FX in the FX pipeline
and its basic parameters will appear.
For more advanced controls, each timeline FX has an editor.
You can enter an FX’s editor by clicking the Editor button.
There you will be exposed to the full breadth of tools that the timeline effect has to offer.
We’ll come back to each one in more detail.
But for now, to exit an effects editor, you would press the EXIT button to the left of the screen.
To mute a timeline FX, click on the blue LED.
Please note that when the timeline FX is muted, it does not require any rendering.
Smoke refers back to the original media. Clicking the RENDER button will not do anything.
To re-enable the timeline FX, click on the LED again.
To delete the Timeline FX, you can either right-click on it and choose delete or click on the Delete button
at the far right of it’s parameters.
Alternatively you can grab the timeline FX from the FX pipeline and drag it to the bottom of the screen
until you see the trash can icon.
Coming back to the actual segment in the timeline, you can see the dotted line at the top.
This indicates a partially rendered timeline FX.
The partial render in the segment could refer to one frame under the positioner or multiple frames in the segment.
At some point this entire clip will need to be rendered.
If you step through the segment with the arrow keys, Smoke will render the frames as
it advances from one frame to the next.
The rendered selection of the segment is a solid back line that you can scrub and see the final result.
To completely render a segment, you would press the RENDER button.
Smoke will only process the remaining frames that require rendering.
If you wish to re-render the entire clip again, you can click on the drop down menu and choose FORCE RENDER.
This will ignore any previous renders and re-render the selected segment.
Just so that you know what is happening under the hood,
if you were to delete the timeline FX that effectively deletes the render files,
So smoke will flush the renders from its media cache so you don’t have to manually delete any render files.
If you encounter a solid white line on a segment, it simply means that the segment is unrendered
and you will get a unrendered message in the record viewer when you scrub the segment.
Another useful technique to know about is that you can apply Timeline FX to virtual clips in the sequence.
These are called gap effects.
In other applications, you might refer to this as an adjustment layer.
To create a GAP effect, you can create a new video track above the edit or use an existing one.
Now even though there does not appear to be anything on the track, you can still select the empty area
and Smoke selects the empty GAP clip.
You can splice it up using the keyboard shortcut and apply a timeline FX to the gap clip.
The benefit of this is that the timeline FX is separated from the edit on the underlying video tracks.
You could use the GAP effect to apply a title across multiple shots, or you could apply a colour correction to the GAP effect.
This means you could grade your sequence but still re-arrange the edits.
In the next video, the first timeline FX you will look into is resize.