Quick Summary
Reproducing trending visual effects (flame cuts, air distortion) without After Effects or a motion designer is doable, but the pipeline has more edge cases than you'd expect.
Budget cap forced a tool swap mid-project. That swap taught me more about output format compatibility than six months of "just use what you know."
The final workflow is boring. That's the point.
It started because a client complained. Not about the video quality — about the transitions. Specifically, they'd seen a competitor's reel using a Flame Transition between product shots and wanted the same thing. Their exact words were "it just pops." I nodded, went back to my desk, and spent the next 23 minutes Googling whether ffmpeg had a native flame filter. (It does not. There's geq and some creative blend mode abuse, but nothing that looks like actual fire without a lot of manual keyframing.)
