Filters
Black and white and the other filters, the ten adjustments, and adjustment layers that colour everything beneath them.
A filter is colour work on a clip: a preset such as Mono at an intensity, and adjustments on top. It goes on a video clip, where it colours that clip alone, or on an adjustment layer, where it colours every video and graphics track below it for as long as the clip lasts. Captions and text keep their colour either way.
On a clip
Select a video clip or a photo. The sidebar's Filter section shows a row of tiles, None first, then Mono, Noir, Warm and Cool, each the clip's own picture with that preset applied. Click one; a slider sets how much of it applies. Under it, Adjust opens the ten sliders:
| Adjustment | Does |
|---|---|
| Brightness | Exposure: −100 is a stop darker, 100 a stop brighter |
| Contrast | The spread of the tones about the middle grey |
| Saturation | How strong the colours are; −100 is black and white |
| Warmth | The white balance: below 0 cooler, above 0 warmer |
| Tint | The white balance's other axis: below 0 greener, above 0 more magenta |
| Highlights | The bright tones alone, darker or brighter |
| Shadows | The dark tones alone, deeper or lifted |
| Fade | Lifts the blacks towards grey, the matte film look |
| Sharpen | Sharpens the luma; 0 leaves the picture as shot |
| Vignette | Darkens the corners towards the edges of the clip |
Every change shows in the viewer as you drag and lands as one undo step when you let go. Reset adjustments clears the sliders; the None tile clears the preset. Apply to track gives every clip of the track the same filter. The Clip › Filter menu has Copy Filter and Paste Filter for carrying one between clips. A placeholder keeps a filter for the footage that fills it.
Adjustment layers
Add Adjustment Layer in the Add Track menu under the track headers makes an empty one on top. Add Filter (⇧⌘F, or Clip › Add Filter, or Add Filter Here in the layer's own menu) puts a filter clip at the playhead, on the first adjustment layer, making one when there is none. The clip is a labelled block: move it, trim it, split it and delete it like any clip. Its sidebar has the same tiles and sliders, and a Ramp section: In and Out are seconds over which the filter comes in and goes out instead of switching.
Stacking is track order. An adjustment layer colours the tracks below it in the list, not the ones above: between the video tracks and a graphics track it colours the footage and leaves the graphics; above everything it colours the graphics too. Two layers apply bottom to top. Hide the layer (the eye) to turn it off. It has no sound, is never magnetic and takes no files dropped on it.
HDR
In an HDR video the adjustments mean the same thing as on standard footage, and highlights above white stay above white through Mono, contrast, saturation and fade. Highlights and Shadows work over the standard range and hold the clip's peaks at white.
Agents
An agent sets the same things through the document: filter, intensity and adjust on a media clip, and adjustment layers, tracks of "kind": "filter" whose clips carry them (guide filters in the agent's manual). screen reports the picture's filter and every filter clip playing at a second, and measure reads saturation, so an agent can check a stretch is black and white without looking. See How an agent edits.