Distortion

What this group is for

Here the picture stops being flat and becomes a surface you can push on — squeeze it, ripple it, melt it, twist it until it folds back on itself. It is the heat-haze over asphalt, the drug taking hold, the reflection in disturbed water. Motion you can feel before you can name.

Reach for it for music visualisers that need to breathe with the track, dream and hallucination sequences, transitions with physical weight, and any beat where reality should bend rather than cut. Anyone building something that has to move is at home in this group.

The effects

Written up in full: twirl · kaleidoscope — sample frame, parameter table and a downloadable project each.

• twirl — A local vortex rotation around a focal point. Good for a drain-of-consciousness pull and a focal swirl that draws the eye in.
• kaleidoscope — N-fold angular symmetry mirrored around the centre. Good for trance visuals, mandala title cards, and the moment a scene fractures into pattern.
• ripple — A radial sine wave spreading from a focal point. Good for water-drop reveals and the shockwave that announces a change.
• barrel — A radial bulge or pinch around a centre. Good for fish-eye unease, a peephole point-of-view, and lens warp pushed for effect.
• pinch-lines — An axis-aligned pinch pulling the image toward a line. Good for a fold or seam down the frame and a directional squeeze with intent.
• tunnel — A radial perspective crush toward the centre. Good for hyperspace dives, falling-down-the-hole transitions, and infinite-corridor dread.
• luma-displace — Bright cells push the sampling outward, so light bends the picture. Good for heat-haze, energy fields, and a frame that ripples where it glows.
• smear — A directional neighbour-sample blend that drags the image one way. Good for motion-blur attitude and a painterly streak across the shot.
• blur — An isotropic box or gaussian blur over neighbour cells. Good for soft-focus dream states and pulling attention off a background.
• ghost-chars — An offset afterimage of neighbour characters trailing the source. Good for double-vision, intoxication, and a haunted echo on every edge.
• spiral-pull — A spiral distortion combining twirl rotation with a radial pull, where tightness sets the vortex concentration. Good for a black-hole drag and a wind-up before a hard transition.
• parallax-split — Splits depth by luminance — bright cells shift one way, dark cells the other — for pseudo-3D parallax. Good for fake stereo depth and a layered, dimensional drift.
• venom-crawl — Animated blob displacement: organic blobs wander the frame, warping the cells beneath them. Good for body-horror, living goo, and a surface that should feel infested.
• split-screen — Divides the canvas into 2–4 zones, each showing a different time offset of the same video. Good for rhythmic montage and a multi-clock, out-of-sync narrative beat.
• window-box — A nested frame: a smaller copy of the video rendered inside a border, picture-in-picture. Good for a screen-within-a-screen and a recursive, watched-from-outside feel.
• shutter-slice — A multi-strip reveal with stagger, strips opening and closing independently like a mechanical shutter. Good for kinetic transitions and a blinds-snapping-open entrance.

How to reach for it

You’ll find these in the editor’s effect picker under the Distortion group, stackable on any clip in whatever order the shot needs. Any effect here can be gated by a mask layer, so the warp lands only where you draw it — just the water, just one figure, just the edge of the frame.