Color-Distance Blend — effect skill for transitions

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A blend that swaps pixels by how different their colours are, so similar areas change first.

What it does

Built on Cross Warp Morph by HeyGen (HyperFrames), Apache-2.0. The write-up and recipes below are varg's.

Shapes of B emerge where A and B already share colours, then the rest follows: a soft, organic morph.

When: Two shots with matching palettes or composition: sky to sky, face to face.

Watch out: Using it on unrelated shots, where it looks like a muddy dissolve.

Timing: 0.8–1.2 s.

Also called: Morph blend

In FFmpeg

Both inputs need the same size, frame rate, timebase, SAR and pixel format (settb=AVTB fixes the timebase error that fps alone leaves). offset is where the transition starts on the first clip's timeline (its length minus the overlap).

ffmpeg -i a.mp4 -i b.mp4 -filter_complex \
 "[0:v]fps=30,scale=1920:1080,setsar=1,settb=AVTB,format=yuv420p[a];[1:v]fps=30,scale=1920:1080,setsar=1,settb=AVTB,format=yuv420p[b];\
  [a][b]xfade=transition=distance:duration=0.5:offset=4.5[v];[0:a][1:a]acrossfade=d=0.5[a]" \
 -map "[v]" -map "[a]" out.mp4

In HyperFrames

Closest: the cross-warp-morph or domain-warp-dissolve shader transitions.

Ready-made components

Where this comes from

Use when

Not for

Install

Example output

https://s3.varg.ai/how-to/previews/a5cbae824201/take-xfade-distance.mp4 — distance between two shots, with the timeline strip of the edit. Footage: Cosmos Laundromat (2015), (CC) Blender Foundation | gooseberry.blender.org, CC BY 4.0; Spring (2019), Andy Goralczyk / Blender Foundation (Blender Studio) | studio.blender.org, CC BY 4.0. (credit: Rendered by varg · Cosmos Laundromat (2015) + Spring (2019))

More transitions skills

Run the generation on varg

varg is one API key for the models these skills drive — Seedance 2.5, Kling 4, Veo 3.1, Wan 3, Nano Banana 2.1, GPT Image 2.5, ElevenLabs v4 and 200+ more — billed in credits, with a cost estimate before anything runs.