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Realtime effect plugins are listed in the Resources window as Audio Effects and Video Effects. Effect plugins are used by dragging them from the Resources window onto an audio track if it is an audio effect or video track if it is a video effect. You will see a colored bar appear beneath the track with the plugin name on it. If there is data on the destination track, the effect is applied to the entire track, unless a edit or a region of the track is selected (wipe selection or In/Out points) in which case the effect is pasted into that region only. If there is no data on the track or no selected region set, the effect is not added.
Plugins are layered under the track they apply to in what is referred to as the effect bar. Do a double click on the effect bar to select the effect region. When dragging more than one effect onto an armed track, you will see the effects layering from top to bottom, on the bottom of that track. When the track is played back, effects are processed from top to bottom. The output of the top effect becomes the input of the bottom effect and so on. "The pipeline in Cinelerra's2 plugin design is the pull method. The rendering pipeline starts at the final output and the final steps in the rendering pipeline are reading the data from disk. Every step in the rendering chain involves requesting data from the previous step. When the rendering pipeline eventually requests data from a plugin chain, each plugin requests data from the plugin before it. This is less intuitive than the push method but is much more powerful. Realtime plugins written using the pull method can change the rate data is presented to the viewer and the direction of playback. The pull method allows plugins to take in data at a higher rate than they send it out." Side note: if you want to avoid the automatic top to bottom application of plugins, you can take advantage of nested assets to manipulate the order the plugins are applied (see 6.6).
Instead of dragging from the Resources window, effects may be applied to a single armed track or a region via a popup menu. On the entire track or on a region determined by a selection wipe or by the In/Out points, right click and select Attach effect from the popup. The attach effect dialog gives you more capability than just dragging and dropping. For example, the attach effect dialog lets you attach two more types of effects: shared effects and shared tracks which are explained in a later section. Select a plugin from the Plugins column and hit the green colored checkmark under the plugins column to attach it. The result is the same as if the effect was dragged from the Resources window.
One more method to apply an effect on all armed tracks of the same type (video or audio) is to use the Video or Audio pulldown Attach Effect option. This brings up a menu which has a useful checkbox to Attach single standalone and share others (see 10.4). The default setting is checked on.
After attaching an effect to a track, it often needs to be configured. There are two ways to get to the configuration controls. Click on the magnifying glass symbol on the right side of the effect bar – this is the middle symbol on the bar as you can see in the picture below. Alternatively, you can right click on the effect bar to bring up the effect popup which has a Show option. Either method causes the GUI for the effect to appear in a separate window. There will not be a popup if the plugin has no GUI.
Besides the magnifying glass, for Show Controls, on the effect colored bar beneath the track, there are two more symbols.
The rightmost knob is used to Turn Off/Turn On the effect where the default is On. This is useful to easily see that the plugin is doing what you expect. The leftmost symbol that looks like a gear is for Preset Edit and its usage is described in the section Saved Plugin Presets.