Visual Effects

Exaplay 3 includes a set of live effects for colour, luminance, and creative image processing — all run on the GPU so they can be adjusted while you preview the result.

Colour Correction (always available)

Every clip carries its own Color Correction section in the Inspector, laid out the way image editors do it. It is not one of the effects below: it is a separate stage that composes with whatever effect the clip has, so correcting a clip's colour never costs you the effect slot.

Control	Range	What it does
Brightness	−100…100 % (0)	Lifts or lowers every level. ±100 shifts the whole picture by half its range.
Contrast	0…200 % (100)	Stretches (>100) or flattens (<100) the levels about mid-grey.
Saturation	0…200 % (100)	0 is monochrome, 200 doubles the colour.
Temperature	2000…12000 K (6500)	The colour of the clip's white. Lower is warmer (amber), higher is cooler (blue); 6500 K is untouched. This is a real white balance — a multiplicative move toward the target white, so black stays black and neutrals stay neutral — not a tint laid over the picture.
Tint	−100…100 % (0)	The green (−) / magenta (+) axis perpendicular to Temperature, for a projector or camera that runs green.
Red / Green / Blue	0…200 % (100)	Gain on that channel alone. Pull Green down to take the cast out of a projector that runs green.
Master	0…200 % (100)	Gain on all three at once. Matches a clip's overall level to the rest of the wall.

Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and the white balance are applied first, in that order, on the clip's own picture; the effect (if any) runs on the result; the R/G/B/Master gains are the last stage.

Typical use is matching: one projector or LED tile that does not sit with the others, or a clip graded on a different system than the rest of the show. Set the neighbouring clips to 100 % and trim the odd one out until they agree.

Master is not Opacity

Both make the picture darker, and they are not interchangeable. Master scales the colour, so the clip stays fully solid and simply renders dimmer. Opacity makes the clip transparent, so whatever sits behind it shows through. For matching brightness across a wall you want Master.

Colour correction is:

• Per clip, saved with the show and applied everywhere that clip plays.
• Live — it lands on the next rendered frame, no reload.
• On every media type: video, stills, Hap, NotchLC, NDI and other live inputs, generative sources and text.
• Synced across a multi-client fleet like any other Inspector value, as long as the clients are on the same show.
• Drivable from outside: the nine values (colorcorrect.brightness, .contrast, .saturation, .temperature, .tint, .red, .green, .blue, and .gain for Master) are ordinary inspector properties, so show control can ride them (comp_main.media3.set:colorcorrect.red=80 over TCP, the same over UDP or from a cue script — OSC has no set: verb), and a Data Track with an Exaplay value output can animate one along the timeline.

Two legacy effects are named for what they do now

Warm / Cool Tint (color_temperature) is an additive red/blue offset — it tints black as much as white, which is why it never read as a temperature — and S-Curve Contrast (color_curves) is one strength value toward a fixed curve, with no curve to edit. Both stay so saved shows keep rendering; for a white balance use Temperature above, and for a curve-shaped contrast use Contrast (Color Correction) or the Levels effect. S-Curve Contrast is no longer offered for new clips.

Available Effects

34 effects in 7 groups — the same groups in the Inspector's gallery and in the Media Browser's Effects tab. The full parameter list for every one is in the Effects Reference.

Group	Effects
Color & Tone	Hue / Saturation, Warm / Cool Tint (legacy), Multiply Color, Levels, Brightness / Contrast
Blur & Sharpen	Blur, Sharpen
Stylize	Chromatic Aberration, Vignette, Posterize, Halftone, Scanlines
Keying	Color Key (with spill suppression), Luminance Key
Projection & 360°	Equirectangular 2:1 to Dome, Fisheye 180 to Dome, Fisheye to Dome (Calibrated), Dome Flat to Grid, Rectangular Screen to Dome, Plane to Fisheye (Dome), Lens Distortion, Equirectangular 2:1 to Flat (Pan/Tilt)
LED & Virtual Production	LED Black Level Lift, LED Pixel Grid, LED Gamut Limiter, Eye Adaptation
People & Performers	Particle Dissolve, Hologram, Clone Echo, Neon Outline, Code Body, Digital Glitch, Time Smear, Motion Sparks

An older show can carry an effect that is no longer offered (for example Sepia, Gamma, Shadows & Highlights, Kaleidoscope or S-Curve Contrast). It keeps rendering and stays listed as that clip's effect; it just cannot be picked for a new clip.

People & Performers — live looks for a band or a speaker

Put a camera or an NDI feed of the stage on a clip and give it one of these looks. They animate on their own (from the engine clock), so they keep moving on a live feed, a recorded concert and a still alike.

• Particle Dissolve — the performer as glowing particles; Dissolve sets how much of the body breaks away and drifts up, Drift how fast.
• Hologram — a tinted, scan-lined, flickering hologram with a glowing outline; Hue picks the colour, Glitch how often a band slips.
• Clone Echo — coloured copies of the performer to either side, swaying behind them: one singer becomes a row of singers. Raise Echo Delay and the copies show the performer as they were a moment ago, so they move after them — a real echo in time.
• Neon Outline — the performer drawn as glowing neon lines in cycling colours. Raise Light Trail and the lines linger and fade behind every movement, like light painting.
• Code Body — the performer made of falling code glyphs.
• Digital Glitch — blocks jump, rows tear and the colour channels split on the performer, while the stage around them stays still. Raise Datamosh and some blocks stop updating and slide along with old picture in them, so the performer smears into the stage — a stream that lost its keyframes.
• Time Smear — the performer leaves a rainbow trail of where they were a moment ago: a dancer's arm becomes a fan of colour, a guitarist's swing a streak. Trail Half-Life is how long the trail takes to fade to half (in seconds, so it is the same at any frame rate), Rainbow how strongly the trail is coloured, Colour Speed how fast its colour walks, Rise lets the trail drift upward like smoke. It remembers earlier frames: it restarts when the clip jumps (a cue, a seek), and its hover preview shows a single frame, so it looks like the plain picture there — the card shows the trail.
• Motion Sparks — only what moves throws sparks: a drummer's sticks spray light, a guitarist's strumming hand glitters, a speaker standing still at the lectern stays calm. The sparks rise and swirl away and fade. Motion Threshold sets how much a pixel must change before it counts as movement (raise it on a noisy camera), Spark Half-Life how long the sparks live, Rise and Swirl how they fly, Hue / Rainbow their colour, Spark Density how fine they are. Like Time Smear it remembers the previous frame, so the hover preview shows the plain picture.

How the performer is found. There is no person detection: every look treats what is brighter than Subject Threshold as the performer and the rest as background — which is what a lit performer in front of a dark stage looks like. Raise the threshold until the stage drops out and the performer stays; set it to 0 to treat the whole picture as the subject. Shot on a green screen? Switch on Green Screen instead. Wherever the look finds no performer it is transparent, so it composites over the layer below — put a generator or a backdrop underneath, or raise Original Picture (Particle Dissolve, Neon Outline) to keep the camera image behind it.

Color keying

Remove a specific colour from a layer (e.g. green screen). The key colour is three separate 0–1 channel values (key_r, key_g, key_b — green by default), with tolerance, edge softness, luma tolerance and spill suppression alongside. Full parameter reference: Effects Reference → Keying.

Edge Calm (Color Key and Luminance Key) takes the flicker out of a keyed edge on a live camera: where the matte only jitters from frame to frame (sensor noise), it is smoothed over the time you set; where it really changes (a hand moving), it follows at once, so nothing ghosts. Start around 0.1 s.

Effects that remember

Echo Delay, Light Trail, Datamosh and Edge Calm look at the frames before the current one. At 0 — their default, and what every show saved before they existed gets — they are off and cost nothing extra. They restart when the clip jumps (a cue, a seek), and the effect's hover preview shows a single frame, so it cannot show them.

Tone and colour

Non-destructive levels and brightness/contrast correction, hue/saturation and a colour multiply. Full parameter reference: Effects Reference → Tone & Exposure.

Applying Effects

Via the Inspector

1. Select a clip in the Timeline.
2. In the Inspector, open the Effects section and click Add effect (Change once the clip has one).
3. A gallery opens in place: every card shows the effect applied to this clip's own picture, and animates once you rest the pointer on it. Search narrows the gallery by name, description, category or author.
4. Click a card. The section now shows the effect's name, a live preview on the clip's picture, and one slider per parameter — drag it, or type an exact value into the box beside it.

The section looks and works like a generator's: an effect changes the clip it sits on, a generator is a clip, and both are tuned the same way. The ↺ button resets the effect's parameters to its defaults.

See it done

Open ☰ menu → Walkthroughs → Media, effects & generators → An effect on a clip.

By drag and drop

The Media Browser has an Effects tab next to Generators. It opens on seven folders — Color & Tone, Blur & Sharpen, Stylize, Keying, Projection & 360°, LED & Virtual Production, and People & Performers. Click one to see its effects; the bar at the bottom works as it does for your media — the path shows where you are, the folder button goes back, the search looks through every folder at once, and the zoom slider sets the card size. Each card shows a picture, an arrow, and what the effect turns it into, so you can see what it does before you use it. On a keying card, the checkerboard is what the key removes. For a projection effect (dome, fisheye, 360° window, lens) the picture on the left is the kind it expects — follow the four coloured markers to see where each part lands. Where you drop decides what happens:

• A generator dropped on a track becomes a new clip.
• An effect held over a clip outlines that clip and says what releasing will do: Apply Blur to “Intro”, or Replace Vignette with Blur on “Logo” when the clip already has one (a clip carries one effect). Release to apply it; then tune it in the Inspector as above.
• An effect held over an empty part of a track says Drop … onto a clip — released there, nothing happens.
• An audio clip has no picture, so it takes no effect.

Double-clicking an effect card applies it to the clip shown in the Inspector.

What the preview shows

The preview runs the effect's own shader on the clip's thumbnail, so it shows what the effect does to this picture. It is not the output: the clip's position, crop, warping and colour correction are not applied to it. A track's default effect previews on a test pattern, since a track has no picture of its own.

One effect per clip

A clip carries one effect at a time — the picker is a choice, not a stack. Selecting a different effect replaces the current one. Effect chaining is in development; earlier versions of this page described a "+ Effect" button and stacking that do not exist.

The everyday colour match no longer costs you the slot — that lives in Colour Correction above, which runs alongside whatever effect is selected. The limit still applies to the effects themselves: two of them on one clip is not possible.

Effect Performance

Effects run on the GPU and add negligible overhead.

Removing Effects

• Click ✕ in the Effects section's header. The section then offers Add effect again.

Projection effects: orientation corrected

Five projection effects drew the picture the wrong way up or mirrored: Equirectangular 2:1 to Dome showed the ground at the zenith, Equirectangular 2:1 to Flat showed 360° footage upside down, Fisheye 180 to Dome mirrored the image top to bottom, and Rectangular Screen to Dome and Dome Flat to Grid placed the screen upside down. All five now follow the dome convention: zenith in the centre, the front at the bottom, left on the left. If a show worked around this (for example by flipping a clip or rotating the dome), remove that workaround.

The four dome fills are generators now

Dome Hyperspace Tunnel, Dome Aurora Nebula, Dome Fluid Flow and Dome Fire Sphere used to be effects, but they never used the clip's picture — they replaced it. They are now in the Generators tab (category Dome), where you drag them onto a track like any other generator. A show that already uses one as an effect keeps playing it; the Inspector notes where it lives now.