ABSTRACT

A compound effect is one that looks at a second layer to decide exactly how to treat the layer it is applied to. Examples of these vary from Compound Blur – which can selectively blur one layer based on the varying luminance values of another – to texturize, which is great for simulating those embossed station identity bugs most networks use these days, among other things. The “modifying” layer that a compound effect points to can range from a simple gradient to a second movie or composition. In most cases, the information being passed is the brightness values of each pixel of a grayscale image, or the luminance values in a color image. These gray levels are then used by the effect to determine which pixels in the first layer are blurred, faded, displaced, and so on.