Shine on Text, with Two Filters

Nothing is imported. Open Other → Text opens a dialog with one empty box, a Background color... button already reading transparent, and a line of small print: text attributes are available in the Filters panel after clicking OK. That is the point — the dialog only takes the words, and every setting on this page is set afterwards.

The timeline behind it already carries two empty video tracks, V1 and V2. Both are needed before the end.

Clicking OK creates a clip named transparent carrying a single Text: Simple filter, and the panel underneath is where the look is decided. The player shows the text box as a draggable rectangle you can size directly.

The text is dragged out of the preview and onto V1, the lower of the two tracks. The drag tooltip reads +00:01:01 = 00:00:02:21, so the clip lands about two and a half seconds long. The source itself opened at 04:00:00:01 — a text clip has no natural length, so you trim it to whatever the shine should take.

The clip is copied and pasted onto V2. There are now two identical pieces of text stacked exactly on top of each other, which is why nothing looks different in the player yet. Position now reads 0, 405 rather than the 0, 447 of ten seconds earlier; the block was nudged up while it was being placed, and that adjustment is not itself in any sampled frame.

With V1 as the current track, the Font swatch on its Text: Simple filter opens the colour dialog. The value chosen is #686868 — a flat mid grey, R 104, G 104, B 104, with alpha left at 255. This is the only colour decision in the entire build, and it is what the shine will be seen against.

The two layers now differ: V1 holds grey text, V2 still holds the original white. Because they sit in the same place at the same size, the picture reads as one piece of grey text — V2 is covering V1 completely. Making the white one visible only in a narrow strip is the entire remaining problem, and the + button in the Filters panel is where it gets solved.

Mask: Simple Shape is added to the V2 clip, underneath Text: Simple in the filter list. It arrives on its defaults and those defaults are already almost the effect: a rectangle in the middle of the frame, everything outside it cut away, so the grey of V1 shows through around it. In the player the word goes is bright white and the rest of the line has gone grey.

Two sliders do all the shaping. Width drops from 10.00 % to 4.76 %, which makes the revealed band about half as wide — roughly one letter across at this text size. Horizontal drops to 13.42 %, which walks the band over to the left-hand edge of the words, where the sweep will start.

Softness stays at its default 20.00 %. That is what keeps the edges of the band from looking like a cut-out rectangle; it is why the result reads as a highlight rather than a window.

The playhead goes to the very start of the clip and the stopwatch beside Horizontal is clicked. That one click turns Horizontal into an animated parameter and writes a keyframe where the playhead is standing. The panel switches from Timeline to Keyframes, which now shows a Mask: Simple Shape clip with a Horizontal track beneath it.

The starting value in this frame is 8.23 %, a little further left than the 13.42 % of ten seconds earlier. Only Horizontal carries a stopwatch that is lit; Vertical, Width and Height stay static.

The playhead moves to the tail of the clip and Horizontal is dragged up to 84.42 %. Typing or dragging a new value while the stopwatch is already on writes the second keyframe automatically; there is no separate command.

84.42 % puts the band beyond the right-hand end of the words rather than on them, which is deliberate — the shine has to leave the text, not stop inside it. That is why the player looks like plain grey text in this frame: at the end of the clip the white band is off the letters entirely.

The last twenty seconds are scrubbing: the playhead is dragged back and forth across the clip and the value in the Horizontal field follows it — 80.43 % at 1:40, 84.42 % at 1:50. Watching the number move with the playhead is the confirmation that the animation took.

Nothing is exported. The video ends on the working project, which is fair for a two-minute tip — the effect either sweeps or it does not, and you can see which in the player.