Spotlight

A spotlight dims a clip everywhere outside a rectangle or ellipse, so the eye goes to one part of the picture, such as a button in a screen recording. It can also magnify what’s inside. Any clip that draws can have one, text and shapes included.

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

Spotlight a region

Select the clip and open the Clip tab’s Picture sub-tab.
Open the Spotlight section and tick Spotlight a region. You get a 480 × 270 rectangle at the centre of the picture.
Set Center X, Center Y, Width and Height to place it.
Adjust the other rows until it looks right.

There’s no handle for a spotlight on the canvas, so the rows are the only way to place it. It’s easier to see the region while you do if you raise Dim and lower Feather for a moment.

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

While the section is closed, its header shows off, rectangle or ellipse.

The controls

The rows are greyed out until the box is ticked.

Row	What it does	Default	Range	Quick picks
Shape	Rectangle or Ellipse.	Rectangle
Center X, Center Y	Where the middle of the region sits, measured from the centre of the clip’s picture.	0 px, 0 px	−20,000 to 20,000 px
Width, Height	The size of the region.	480 × 270 px	1 to 20,000 px	Width 240, 480, 720, 960. Height 135, 270, 405, 540
Feather	How many pixels the edge softens over. 0 is a hard edge.	40 px	0–200 px	0, 10, 20, 40, 80
Dim	How much darker everything outside the region goes. 0 % changes nothing and 100 % is black.	60 %	0–100 %	0, 30, 60, 80, 100
Zoom	How much to magnify what’s inside. 1.00× is no zoom.	1.00×	1.00–2.00×	1, 1.2, 1.5, 2

Place the spotlight

The centre and size are in the clip’s own pixels, measured from the centre of its cropped picture. A positive Center X moves the region right and a positive Center Y moves it down.

Because they belong to the picture, the spotlight stays on the same part of it when you move, scale or rotate the clip. They also don’t depend on the canvas, so the default 480 × 270 covers less of a 4K clip than of a 1080p one.

The region can sit partly or wholly off the clip.

What gets dimmed

The dim only changes colour. Dimmed parts of the clip stay as solid as they were, so nothing behind shows through, and transparent parts stay transparent.

It comes after every colour stage, so the clip’s grade and filters don’t act on it.

Magnify the region

Zoom enlarges what’s inside the region about its centre. It works with Dim at 0 % too, which gives you a magnifier with no darkening.

The magnification eases off towards the edge of the region so the picture doesn’t tear there. That edge is always wide enough for the zoom to fade out smoothly, so it can be softer than Feather makes the edge of the light.

The enlarged picture comes from the same frame, so it gets softer as Zoom rises.

Animate a spotlight

Every number ramps in an action, so a spotlight can slide from one part of the picture to another, grow, or brighten as it goes.

Two controls switch rather than ramp:

Shape changes at the action’s end, and the row shows “at end”. The numbers keep ramping.
Ticking or unticking Spotlight a region with an action selected makes the spotlight appear or disappear at the action’s end.

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

Good to know

A spotlight lasts as long as the clip. To point at something for a few seconds, split the clip around that moment and put the spotlight on the middle piece.
With several clips selected, the rows show the first clip’s spotlight, and any edit gives every selected clip all of those values.
On a matte track, a clip’s spotlight shapes the cut it makes. Alpha and Inverted Alpha read only transparency, so Dim changes nothing there.
A clip’s reflection shows its spotlight too, mirrored.
A nest clip shows the Spotlight section, but a spotlight on it has no effect. Put it on the clips inside.
An adjustment clip has no Picture sub-tab, and a spotlight pasted onto one does nothing.

With an agent

An agent sets spotlight with set_video, as an object of shape (rect or ellipse), x, y, width, height, feather, dim and zoom, and null takes the spotlight off. It isn’t held to the fields’ limits for placing a spotlight: it can set any centre, any size above 0 and any feather of 0 or more. dim runs from 0 to 1 rather than as a percentage, and zoom from 1 to 2. See Tools: picture and grade.