AI Assistant

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Layer Effects

The Layer Effects panel adds structural effects to a single layer. Select any visual layer and the section sits in the right panel, directly under Shadows.

Click + in the section header to pick an effect to add, the same way you add transitions. Each one you add gets its own block of controls, and the trash icon on its header removes it. Effects that don’t apply to the selected layer aren’t offered — 3D Depth only appears for still images.

Four effects are available today:

3D Depth — turns a still photo into a 2.5D scene that the camera can move through. Photos only.
Running Glow — a light that runs along the layer’s outline, trailing a comet and a soft bloom. Works on shapes, text, photos, footage, mockups and sequences.
Motion Blur — smears the layer along its own motion, like a real camera shutter (below).
Grow Fill — an animated infection-style fill that creeps across the layer’s shape. It has its own page.

All render in the preview and in every export that uses the full renderer (Render Video and the server render). None costs anything when it is off — a layer with the effects disabled renders exactly as it did before.

Overlay Effects are a separate stackable chain. They are stored consistently on regular and adjustment layers: on a regular layer they process that layer alone; on an adjustment layer they restyle all layers below it.

3D Depth

A photograph is flat, so a camera move across it just slides the whole picture. 3D Depth estimates how far away every pixel is, and then a camera move parts the near objects from the far ones — the foreground travels further than the background, the way it would if you had filmed the scene.

Analyse the photo

Select a photo layer, open Layer Effects, add 3D Depth from the + menu, then click Analyse depth…. A depth model runs over the image and produces a depth map, which is stored inside the project.

It runs once per photo. Afterwards the effect is free — nothing is re-analysed when you scrub, render or reopen the project.
The first analysis of your session downloads the model (about 25 MB), so it needs an internet connection that one time. Your browser caches it, and the depth map itself is saved in the project, so renders and later sessions work offline.
Analysis takes a second or two on a machine with a GPU, longer without one.
The depth map travels with the project — duplicate the layer, copy it to another project, or export and reimport the board and the depth comes with it.

Use ↻ to re-analyse (after replacing the image, for example) and the trash icon to drop the depth map.

Make it move

3D Depth does nothing on its own — the project camera drives it. Add a camera layer and give it a move:

Camera move	Effect on a depth layer
Pan (`camX` / `camY`)	Sideways parallax — the strongest, most obvious depth cue
Dolly (`camDolly`)	Pushes into the scene; near objects grow faster than far ones
Tilt (`camTiltX` / `camTiltY`)	Look-around, as if leaning past the subject
Zoom (`camZoom`)	Nothing, by design — a zoom is a lens change, and a real lens zoom flattens a scene rather than revealing depth. Use dolly if you want to travel into the picture.

A camera preset, hand-keyframed camera, or Camera Motion Path all work. If a channel has the camera lock on, its layers don’t follow the camera, so they don’t parallax either.

Controls

Strength (default 100%) — how far near and far pixels separate. Push past 150% for a stylised look; very high values on a busy photo will start to smear the edges of foreground objects, which is the limit of what a single photo can be stretched to.
Focus Plane (default 45%) — which depth stays pinned in place. Everything nearer than the focus plane moves against the camera, everything further moves with it. Lower it to make the background swim behind a locked subject; raise it to make a foreground object pop out over a locked background.

Both are keyframable — see below.

If you can’t see the parallax

The effect scales with the size of the camera move, because that is what it is reacting to. A few things to check, in order:

Is the camera actually moving? With the playhead inside a camera clip, Pan X / Pan Y / Dolly must change over the clip. A camera clip whose values are all at their defaults transforms nothing, so there is nothing for depth to modulate.
Are you only zooming? Camera zoom is a lens zoom and deliberately produces no parallax. Swap it for Dolly (or add a pan) if you want to travel into the picture.
Is the move very small? The gentle handheld presets move Pan X by less than one percent — enough for a lifelike drift, but the depth separation at that scale is a few pixels. Raise Strength, or use a bigger pan.
Is the channel camera-locked? A locked channel ignores the camera, so its layers can’t parallax.
Is the subject where you think it is? Turn Strength up to 300% temporarily — that makes the separation obvious, and shows you which parts of the picture the model judged near and far. Then dial it back.

A photo with clear foreground/background separation (a person against a landscape, an object on a table) reads far better than a flat scene shot straight on. The model can only work with the depth cues that are in the picture.

Running Glow

A bright light travels along the layer’s contour, leaving a coloured trail and a soft glow behind it. It reads the layer’s shape, not its bounding box, so on text it traces the letters and on a logo it traces the artwork.

On text: switch the letters to Outline

The glow draws on the glyph boundary, so solid letters largely swallow it — the fill occupies exactly the space the light is trying to occupy. Hollow letters are nothing but boundary, which is what makes neon type work.

In the text layer’s Text Colors section, set Fill Style:

Fill Style	Result
Fill	Solid glyphs (the default). The glow reads as a faint rim.
Outline	Hollow glyphs. This is the neon-sign look — use it with Running Glow.
Both	Solid glyphs with a rim, useful with a contrasting Outline Color.

Outline Width sets the stroke in pixels, and Outline Color defaults to the text colour (clear it with the trash icon to go back to matching).

Then set Trace (in the glow’s Source group) to Thin lines / outlines. Adding the glow to a layer that is already in outline mode does this for you; the rest of this page explains why it matters.

Outline type is a normal typographic setting, so it works without the glow too, and it applies to animated/split text and clipping masks the same way.

Two things that stop the glow finding your letters

A caption bar, border or drop shadow becomes the shape. Those are opaque rectangles drawn on the same layer, so the layer’s silhouette is the box, and the light dutifully runs around the box instead of the type. The panel warns when a text layer has one. Remove it for glowing letters — or keep it, which is how you get a glowing panel or button.

**A filled interior is what the Filled shape trace mode looks for.** See Trace, below.

Add it from the + menu and the layer starts with the Neon Circuit look. Six presets give you a starting point:

Preset	Look
Neon Circuit	Two cyan runners on a crisp line — signage, tech UI
Laser Sweep	A magenta bar sweeping across at an angle
Ember Trace	Slow orange embers with a flicker
Chrome Pulse	Fast, tight, bright — three runners on a strong static rim
Halo Orbit	Barely-there line inside a very wide mint bloom
Edge Only	The outline alone — the layer’s own image is hidden

Edge

The crisp line itself.

Edge Width — line thickness, in pixels at 1080p (it scales with your output size).
Edge Offset — pushes the line outside (+) or inside (−) the shape.
Edge Level — line brightness. 0 removes the line and leaves only the bloom.
Static Rim — how much of the line stays lit everywhere, instead of only where the runner is. 0 means the outline is invisible until the light reaches it; 100 lights the whole outline evenly and the runner just brightens it.

Glow

The bloom around the line.

Glow Radius — how far the bloom reaches (pixels at 1080p). 0 switches the bloom off completely, leaving just the running line — and it costs nothing, since the blur is skipped entirely rather than computed and hidden.
Glow Level — bloom brightness.
Softness — a tight halo hugging the line versus a broad, diffuse one.
Spread — which side of the outline the bloom lands on: +100 outward only, 0 both sides, −100 inward only. Push it outward on filled shapes, or a wide bloom floods the interior.
Head Glint — an extra white-hot spark at the head of the runner.

Run

How the light travels.

Path — Around the shape orbits the contour; Linear sweep passes a straight bar across the frame.
Sweep Angle (linear sweep) — the bar’s direction.
Centre X / Y (around the shape) — moves the point the light orbits, which changes where on the outline it speeds up and slows down.
Direction — Forward or Reverse. Reverse runs the light the other way round the path, and the trail leads instead of follows.
Speed — cycles per second.
Runners — up to 8 lights spaced evenly along the path.
Trail — comet length, from a short dash to a long smear.
Flicker — irregular brightness, for a faulty-neon feel.

Colour

Three swatches: Head (the hot leading point), Trail (the colour it cools into) and Glow (the bloom). A white head into a saturated trail is what makes the light read as moving rather than merely coloured.

Each swatch has an opacity slider, and because the light is additive it dials that component down rather than blending it — so the alpha is a mixer, not just a fade. Take Glow to 0 and the bloom disappears, leaving a clean running line; take Head and Trail to 0 instead and the line goes, leaving only the soft halo.

Source

Mask — what counts as this layer’s shape.
Alpha (shape) — the layer’s transparency. Correct for text, logos, shapes and cut-outs, whatever colour they are. This is the default.
Luminance — bright areas of the picture. Use this on full-frame photos and footage, where the layer is opaque everywhere and its alpha carries no shape at all. With Alpha on a full-frame clip the glow just traces the rectangular frame edge.
Alpha × Luma — bright areas within an already-transparent layer.
Threshold (luminance modes) — how bright a pixel must be to count as part of the shape.
Trace — what kind of shape is being lit, and the setting most likely to make the difference between a glow and nothing at all.
Filled shape (default) — runs the light along the contour of a solid area: a shape layer, a logo, filled text, footage. It finds that contour by looking for the boundary of a filled region.
Thin lines / outlines — lights the strokes themselves. Use it for outlined text, hairlines, line art and thin logos. These have no filled interior, so there is no region boundary to find, and Filled shape mode correctly reports that it found nothing — the effect simply doesn’t appear. Thin mode lights the stroke directly instead. In thin mode Edge Width should roughly match your content’s stroke width, since that is what the brightness is normalised against.
Layer Level — dims the layer’s own image under the glow. Set it to 0 for the outline alone on transparency (that’s what the Edge Only preset does).
Effect Amount — master intensity, and the value to keyframe when you want the whole effect to fade in or out. At 0 the effect is completely off.

Motion Blur

The layer is smeared along its own motion — position, rotation and scale keyframes, Motion Paths and parenting all count, and rotation produces true per-pixel tangential streaks (the hub stays sharp while the rim smears). The blur is computed analytically from the transform one frame earlier, so preview, scrubbing and export are deterministic and always agree. It runs last in the per-layer pipeline — after camera depth-of-field, Running Glow and the Overlay Effects chain — so the shutter blurs the layer’s finished look.

Mode — Accumulation (true shutter), the default: the layer is rendered at Samples sub-frame positions inside the shutter window and averaged, the physically correct blur. Velocity smear (fast) is the cheap single-pass option (Max Blur and Falloff apply there).
Shutter — degrees of exposure; 360° = the full inter-frame distance. Keyframable.
Phase — where the streak lands: Trailing (behind motion) by default, with a crisp leading edge; Centered and Leading remain as options.
Samples, Max Blur, Falloff (high = flat camera-true shutter, low = stylised soft smear with a sharp core), and a keyframable Effect Amount.

It cannot see motion inside the footage itself — that stays sharp by design. A static layer is an exact bypass.

Keyframing

Parameters worth animating carry a ◆ next to their label. Click it to start a track and jump to the Keyframe Builder; the field then becomes read-only, because the keyframes own the value from that point on. Click the diamond again to drop the track and go back to a fixed value.

Effect	Keyframable
3D Depth	Strength, Focus Plane
Running Glow	Effect Amount, Edge Level, Glow Level, Glow Radius, Sweep Angle
Motion Blur	Effect Amount, Shutter
Grow Fill	Fill, Grow Speed, Start Fill

A rack focus on a photo is a keyframed Focus Plane. A glow that arrives with a beat is a keyframed Effect Amount. A pulsing halo is a keyframed Glow Radius.

Speed is deliberately not keyframable. The runner’s position is computed directly from the clip’s time, which is what guarantees the preview and the export agree frame for frame. Animating the speed value would jump the light rather than accelerate it. To change pace mid-shot, cut to a second clip with a different speed, or animate Effect Amount across the seam.

Performance notes

Running Glow adds two full-frame GPU passes for each layer that uses it, and a wide Glow Radius is the expensive part. During playback the preview quietly runs the bloom at lower quality and restores full quality when you pause or export, so what you render is always the better-looking version.
3D Depth costs almost nothing at render time — the expensive step happened once, during analysis.
Both effects switch the frame onto the editor’s multi-pass compositor (the same one adjustment layers, clipping masks and camera depth-of-field use). A frame with none of those active still takes the fast single-pass path.

Where the settings live

Everything is stored on the timeline item, so it copies with the layer, survives undo/redo, and saves with the project:

Stackable Overlay Effects use item.effects[] on both regular and adjustment items.
A regular layer applies its Overlay Effects before its cross or in/out transition, so the transition receives the already-effected layer.
Layer Effects use item.layerEffects[]: runningGlow stores its controls in params; depth3d stores strength/focus in params and its generated map in that entry’s depthMap.
There are no top-level glow, depth, or depthMap settings.

Agents should use the complete schemas in the video-effects.md reference of the greenlight-dash skill.