Color and Effects

The Timeline’s color and effects tools turn a raw storyboard into something that looks like a finished cut. You get three kinds of control: color grading, transitions between clips, and keyframe animations on still frames.

Per-beat color grading

Select any clip on the Primary Video or Alternate Frames track and open the Inspector. The Color panel exposes three controls:

Tint

Shift the clip’s overall color temperature and hue. Warm the oranges, cool the blues, push toward magenta or teal.

Grain

Add film grain. Useful for matching the look of photochemical film or roughening up a clean AI-generated image.

Chromatic Aberration

A subtle RGB split at edges. Adds an analog, lens-like quality — light use only unless you want stylized sci-fi.

Each control is per-clip, so you can push one beat toward a dream-sequence palette while the rest of the scene stays neutral.

Global grade presets

Instead of (or on top of) per-clip grading, you can apply a global grade preset to the whole timeline. Common presets:

• Cinematic — teal shadows, warm highlights; the default “movie” look
• Anime — high saturation, clean blacks, pushed magenta/cyan
• Noir — desaturated, high contrast, deep shadows
• Vintage — reduced contrast, warm cast, subtle vignette
• Documentary — flat, natural, minimal processing

Global grades stack on top of per-clip color. Start with a preset for the overall mood, then tweak individual clips that need to read differently.

Tip

Grade once, not beat-by-beat. If you want a consistent look across the whole scene, pick a global preset first. Only grade individual clips when a specific beat needs to break the look — a flashback, a dream, a POV shot.

Transitions between clips

By default, clips abut edge-to-edge with a cut — the hardest possible transition. To soften, add one of the built-in transitions between two adjacent clips:

Transition	What it does
Cut	No transition. One clip ends, the next begins. The default.
Fade	Fade out to black, then fade in. Classic scene break.
Dissolve	Cross-fade — one clip dissolves into the next. Softer than a cut.
Wipe	One clip is pushed off by the next. Strong, stylized.

Select a clip, open the Inspector, and choose a transition type and duration (typically 0.3–1.0 seconds). Transitions live on the incoming edge of each clip.

Keyframe animations

Storyboard frames are stills. The Timeline can animate them — pan across the frame, zoom in on a detail, rotate — to give a static image a sense of motion.

Select a clip and open the Motion panel in the Inspector. You can keyframe:

• Pan (X/Y) — move the frame horizontally or vertically over time
• Zoom — scale from a wider view to a closer one (or vice versa)
• Rotation — subtle tilts for emotional effect

A keyframe is a point in time with a specific value. The Timeline interpolates between keyframes, creating motion. Two keyframes — one at the start of the clip, one at the end — give you continuous motion for the clip’s duration.

Ken Burns presets

Manually keyframing every still takes time. The Ken Burns presets automate the common cases:

Slow Push In

Starts wide, zooms in slowly over the clip’s duration. The standard documentary move.

Slow Pull Back

Starts tight, zooms out — a reveal.

Pan Left / Pan Right

Horizontal movement across the frame at a steady pace.

Corner Push

Zoom toward a specific corner — useful for drawing attention to a character or object.

Apply a preset with one click, then tweak the keyframes it generates if the default motion isn’t quite right.

Stacking effects

All three kinds of effect — color, transitions, keyframes — can stack on the same clip. A clip can have a global grade applied, a warm tint on top, a slow push-in Ken Burns move, and a dissolve into the next clip. The editor previews all of it in real time in the Preview Monitor.

Caution

Heavy effects slow preview playback. If preview gets choppy, bypass effects temporarily (Inspector toggle) to audition timing, then re-enable for final review and export.

Related

Tracks Effects are properties on video clips — this is the track system they apply to.

Playback Controls JKL, snap grid, and in/out points for auditioning effects.

Captions and Markers Subtitles and timecode bookmarks — the other editorial layer on top of clips.

Export Formats How effects bake into the final MP4.

FAQ

Does a color grade change the original frame? No. Grading is non-destructive. The underlying Storyboard frame file is untouched; grades live on the Timeline clip and are applied at playback and export.

Can I grade multiple clips at once? Yes. Select clips with shift-click, then any color change in the Inspector applies to all selected clips.

What’s the difference between a global grade and a per-clip grade? Global grades apply uniformly to every clip on the timeline — same preset, same values. Per-clip grades are additive tweaks on top, specific to one beat. Use global for scene-wide mood, per-clip for outliers.

How long should a transition be? Short cuts (0.3 seconds or less) feel crisp. Longer dissolves (1–2 seconds) feel dreamy or transitional. When in doubt, err shorter — overlong transitions drag pacing.

Can I keyframe anything besides pan/zoom/rotation? Those three are the motion keyframes. Color properties are per-clip, not keyframed — if you need a grade to change over time, split the clip into sections and grade each section separately.

Will my effects look the same in the exported MP4 as they do in preview? Yes — with one exception. Heavy effects may preview at lower framerates for performance, but the export renders at full quality.