Video effects
Single-purpose effects you can apply to a whole clip or to one moment in it. Each does one thing, so you compose the look you want rather than picking a preset that nearly fits.
They never change the clip's length
Every effect here covers the stretch of video it applies to, rather than being inserted in front of it. A freeze holds the picture over that moment; it does not push the rest of the video later.
That matters more than it sounds:
Audio is never touched. Narration keeps playing underneath a freeze instead of pausing for it.
Nothing downstream shifts. Burned-in captions stay on the words, and the clip ends when it always did.
Effects stack. Point several at the same moment and each one applies without moving the others.
Find Beat
Locates a phrase in a transcript and returns when it lands, in seconds.
Wire the words you want to hit and a transcript from a Transcribe node. Everything else in this section can take the result as its At input.
Land on
The end of the phrase (default) lets the line finish before the effect fires. The start is for effects that should run underneath the words instead of reacting to them.
Offset
Nudges the moment. The small negative default keeps the matched word on screen, since a word ends exactly as the next caption swaps in.
If the phrase is not in the transcript, Find Beat returns an empty result and says so in the run. It does not fail the run — a phrase that was never spoken is a normal outcome, and the effects downstream simply do nothing.
Freeze Frame
Holds a single frame for a moment. Needs something wired into At; without one it passes the video straight through.
Hold sets how long the frame holds.
Punch In
Snaps the framing closer. Amount is a percentage: 100 keeps the framing, 125 snaps in a quarter closer.
Apply to decides the scope:
A moment (default) needs an At, and does nothing without one.
The whole clip ignores At entirely.
The default is deliberate. When this hangs off a Find Beat that came up empty, doing nothing is right, and punching in on an entire episode is not.
Desaturate
Drains the colour. Takes the same Apply to scope as Punch In.
Contrast is lifted slightly by default. Colour carries a lot of the separation in a frame, and removing it without any contrast back tends to read as flat rather than stylised.
Sound Effect
Outputs the URL of a bundled one-shot, ready to wire into Audio Overlay:
Fahh — recoiling at something gross or absurd
Vine boom — a hit, a reveal, sudden emphasis
Record scratch — wait, what? something undercut
These are widely recognised on purpose. The effect depends on the audience already knowing the sound, which is also why matching the sound to the beat matters: a reaction is not a reveal.
Audio Overlay
Lays a sound over the video's own audio.
Wire a video, an audio source (a Sound Effect node, an Audio Generation node, or any audio URL) and optionally an At for when it starts.
Nothing is ducked. The sound plays on top of the narration rather than in place of it, and a one-shot longer than the moment rings out over the resumed picture instead of being cut to fit. Gain adjusts only the overlaid sound; the clip's own audio is left exactly as it was.
Chaining them
Effects are separate nodes, so each one is its own render pass. Chaining four costs four passes of time and a little image quality, which is the price of being able to compose them freely. In practice that is a few extra seconds on a short.
Two habits keep it cheap:
Point every effect in a chain at the same Find Beat output rather than repeating a timestamp.
Group the chain and save it as a recipe once it looks right, so the next pipeline reuses it instead of rebuilding it.
When a moment falls outside the clip
If the moment lands past the end of the video, the effect is skipped and the run continues with a note explaining why. Losing a finished render over a missed effect costs far more than missing the effect.
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