Shadow

A drop shadow lifts a clip off what’s behind it. It’s cast by the clip’s own shape: the picture, a text clip’s letters, or a shape’s outline and fill.

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

Drop shadow

Select a clip, open the Shadow section in the Clip tab’s Picture sub-tab, and tick Drop shadow. It’s off by default, and every clip that draws has it, text, shapes and graphics included. A nest clip shows the section too, but a shadow set there isn’t drawn. Set it on the clips inside.

Turning it on gives a soft shadow, down and to the right: black at 50 % with a 12 px blur, at 315° and 8 px away. The other rows stay greyed until it’s on.

The section’s header reads “off”, or the blur in pixels. Reset takes the shadow off.

The shadow follows what the clip actually draws. A clip with a key or Remove Background casts the shadow of what’s left, and the shadow fades with the clip’s opacity.

Shape the shadow

Color

Any colour, black by default. A colour you can see through multiplies with Opacity, so the shadow gets fainter than Opacity alone says.

In an HLG project, shadow colours are lifted with the other drawn colours. See A project’s dynamic range.

Opacity

The shadow’s strength. The range is 0 to 100 %, the default is 50 %, and the quick picks are 0, 25, 50, 75 and 100.

Blur

How soft the shadow is. The range is 0 to 200 px, the default is 12 px, and the quick picks are 0, 4, 8, 12, 24 and 48.

The pixels are the clip’s own, so the blur grows when you scale the clip up.

Angle

Which way the shadow falls. The range is 0 to 360°, the default is 315°, and the quick picks run every 45°.

0° is to the right, and the angle increases anticlockwise, so 90° is up, 180° is left, 270° is down and 315° is down and to the right.

The direction belongs to the canvas, not the clip. Rotating a clip doesn’t turn its shadow, so every shadow at the same angle falls the same way.

Distance

How far the shadow falls from the clip. The range is 0 to 200 px, the default is 8 px, and the quick picks are 0, 4, 8, 16 and 32.

Like Blur, it’s in the clip’s own pixels, so it grows when you scale the clip up.

Animate a shadow

With an action selected, Color, Opacity, Blur, Angle and Distance set the value at the action’s end and animate toward it. The colour blends through the OKLab colour space. Unticking Drop shadow with an action selected turns the shadow off at the action’s end.

Good to know

A shadow has no effect on a clip on a matte track. The settings are kept and apply again when the track stops being a matte.
A clip with Behind subject on has its shadow cut with it.
A clip with a drop shadow gets no motion blur. It draws sharp.

With an agent

An agent sets the shadow with set_video, and changing one setting keeps the others. See Tools: picture and grade.