All help topics

How-to · Games

Drive the VFX pane

Turn an effect's parameters, step or loop it, and read the filmstrip it leaves behind.

You have a Game session and want to work with an effect the session has loaded.

1. Press the VFX tab beside Game and Assets. All three stay mounted, so switching tabs never interrupts what a process is doing.
2. Ask the session to load a built effect binary. Loading an effect is the session's own job, the same way loading a game is.
3. Turn a knob in the Parameters panel. Each parameter carries its own control for its type — a slider, a toggle, a colour picker, a curve or a ramp editor among them. Dragging a slider follows the pointer at once; the effect only receives the value once you let go.
4. Step or run the effect with Step and Run, in the transport row below the picture. Reset starts it over.
5. Press Mark to remember the current tick. Loop then repeats forward by the ticks field's own length and back to the mark, until you press Stop. Restore returns to the mark without looping.
6. Press a thumbnail in the filmstrip to look back at an earlier tick. Only a loop pass fills the filmstrip; Step and Run alone leave it empty.
7. Crop the picture by dragging over it, or with the +, − and Full frame controls beside the transport. Switch between Normal and Schematic rendering next to them.

The picture's tick chip names filmstrip beside the tick when you are looking at a past frame rather than the live picture.

See Modes for what Game mode adds to a session.