Reflection

A reflection hangs a mirrored copy of a clip under its bottom edge, fading out as it goes, like an object standing on a glossy shelf. Any clip that draws can have one, text and shapes included.

Where: Clip tab ▸ Picture ▸ Reflection
Agent tools: set_video

Add a reflection

Select the clip and open the Clip tab’s Picture sub-tab.
Open the Reflection section and tick Mirror the layer below itself.
Adjust the rows until it looks right.

Untick the box, or choose Reset in the section’s header, to take the reflection off. Doing that forgets its settings, so ticking the box again starts from the defaults.

While the section is closed, its header shows off or the reflection’s Opacity.

Shape the reflection

The rows are greyed out until the box is ticked.

Row	What it does	Default	Range	Quick picks
Opacity	How strong the reflection is where it touches the clip.	35 %	0–100 %	0, 20, 35, 50, 75
Height	How much of the clip is mirrored, as a share of its cropped height.	50 %	0–100 %	25, 50, 75, 100
Gap	The space between the clip and its reflection, in the clip’s own pixels.	0 px	0–200 px	0, 4, 8, 16, 32
Falloff	How far the reflection fades on its way down.	100 %	0–100 %	0, 25, 50, 75, 100

Height is a share rather than a size in pixels, so the reflection keeps its proportions when you scale the clip. Gap scales with the clip too.

Falloff fades the reflection in a straight line from its top to the bottom of its Height. At 0 % it doesn’t fade at all, at 50 % it ends at half its Opacity, and at 100 % it reaches transparent exactly at the bottom.

At 0 % Opacity or 0 % Height, nothing is drawn.

What the reflection shows

The reflection is a mirror of the clip, not of the frame around it.

It carries what the clip draws, including its crop, rounded corners, grade, filters and spotlight.
It meets what’s behind it with the clip’s own blend mode, and the clip’s opacity fades it too.
It rotates with the clip.
The clip always draws over its own reflection.
It never shows clips on tracks in front, even ones sitting over the clip.
It casts no shadow of its own.

Animate a reflection

All four numbers ramp in an action. The tick box doesn’t: ticking or unticking it with an action selected makes the reflection appear or disappear at the action’s end.

To fade a reflection in, tick it on the clip with Opacity at 0 %, add an action, and raise Opacity in the action.

Good to know

With several clips selected, the rows show the first clip’s reflection, and any edit gives every selected clip all four of those values.
On a matte track, a clip’s reflection has no effect. It’s kept, and applies again when the track stops being a matte.
A nest clip shows the Reflection section, but a reflection on it has no effect. Put it on the clips inside.
An adjustment clip has no Picture sub-tab, and a reflection pasted onto one does nothing.

With an agent

An agent sets reflection with set_video, as an object of opacity, height, gap and falloff, and null takes the reflection off. opacity, height and falloff run from 0 to 1 rather than as percentages. gap isn’t held to the field’s 200 px limit, so it can be any number of 0 or more. See Tools: picture and grade.