Layer Compositing

Layers are composited from bottom to top in the track. Layers use mappings to control the way the content is applied to screens, and blend modes to determine how the pixels of a layer interact with the pixels “already” on the screen. By default, layers use the Alpha blend mode, which performs standard alpha blending based on the layer’s opacity.

Further composition techniques

In addition to standard screen-space layer blending, Designer provides a number of more advanced methods to composite layers together, including:

• Layer Arrows: Use arrows to pipe content from one layer into another layer for further processing.
• PreComps: Create virtual screens to composite multiple layers together before using them as input to other layers.
• Mask blending: Use content to mask layers above them in the layer stack.
• Effect layers: Use effect layers to apply non-linear effects to their inputs, often used in combination with arrows or precomps.
• Generative layers: Some generative layers can take multiple inputs and composite them together using various methods.

Compositing across multiple transports

When using multiple transports, each transport overlays the previous transport in the multi-transport manager. Therefore, layers on transports higher in the multi-transport manager will composite over layers on lower transports according to their blend modes and opacities. This is still performed per screen.