Basic, Advanced and Expert¶
FaceCue hides most of its controls until you ask for them. One selector in the Hub moves every inspector and window at once.
Why the Tool Has Tiers¶
FaceCue carries a lot of controls. Showing all of them to someone opening the tool for the first time would be worse than useless, and showing all of them to someone who has used it for a year is not much better, because most of the time you are not tuning, you are working.
So the surface is tiered. A control is tagged with the depth it belongs to, and you decide how deep the whole tool is. Nothing is removed, and nothing is behind a paywall or a developer flag. It is just not in the way.
What Each Tier Is For¶
Basic is not a beginner mode. It is the authoring surface, and it is bigger than that name suggests.
It holds the choices that are yours to make about a character: which features are switched on at all, and the main dial for each one that is. On the speech side alone that means anticipation, organic variation, stress modulation, consonant rounding, closure enforcement, vowel reduction and output smoothing are all Basic decisions, each with a strength to go with it. Turning something off, or deciding a character speaks more loosely than the last one, is Basic work. A project can be tuned to taste without ever leaving this tier.
Advanced is where a decision you already made gets refined. The feature is on and you want the timing, the shape or the response curve behind it. It is the tier you reach for when Basic got you close and the last part is a matter of degree.
Expert is values that are already tuned and rarely need touching. Most are not arbitrary numbers someone picked. They are set to match how people actually behave, from what has been measured about real faces and real speech, so moving one is often a decision to be less true to life rather than more. The suggestion is to leave most of them alone.
They are exposed anyway, because a system you cannot open is a system you cannot fix.
The honest summary is that Basic decides what happens, Advanced decides how much, and Expert decides how it is computed.
The Selector¶
The selector lives in the FaceCue Hub, under the question Which level of customization do you want?
It is cumulative. Advanced shows Basic as well, Expert shows everything. Advanced and Expert stay hidden until you ask for them, so a fresh install shows Basic everywhere.
It is also global. One choice moves every FaceCue inspector, drawer and window at once, so you are never in a state where one tool is deep and another is shallow.
Each Tool Can Still Fold Its Own Depth Away
Once a tier is unlocked in the Hub, individual tools carry their own show and hide buttons for it.
The Cue Clip Composer is the clearest case for why it works that way. The composer draws a clip as a stack of rows, one per stage, and at Expert that stack is long enough that the overview it exists to give you is the thing you lose. Reviewing a line, or editing cues, is better work at Basic. The deeper rows answer a different question, the why does it look like that one, and they are worth unfolding when you are digging into it and worth folding away when you are not.
That is a normal way to work rather than a compromise. Unlock Expert globally, keep the composer on Basic, and open the rest only when something needs explaining.
How This Documentation Uses the Tiers¶
Pages here cover the Basic tier in full. If a control decides something about your project, it is written up.
Advanced and Expert controls are named where they matter to a decision you are making, and left to the tool's own help otherwise. FaceCue documents its controls in the editor, on the control itself, so the deep material is a hover away rather than absent, and it cannot drift from the tool the way a written copy of it would.
Where a page names a control that is not Basic, it carries its tier as a badge, like this: Backend Advanced. If you cannot find a control the documentation mentions, check the badge first. You are probably a tier below it.