Portal Cuts: Every Transition Opens Through Something Real

Primary effect: Bring your own effect – Shape-Matched Portal Transitions (custom shaders + alpha-matte shapes)

Five cuts in this train journey open through something that's actually in the shot: a train door, a rushing locomotive, a tunnel mouth, the arches of the Nine Arches Bridge, and the side of a moving train. The next clip plays inside that shape, then the camera pushes straight through into the new scene.

Built in invideo Editor using invideo's MCP connection with Claude. Claude read my timeline, captured frames, measured each shape and wrote every transition as a custom GLSL shader with editable controls, directly on my invideo timeline. No rotoscoping, no tracking, no other editor.

PROCESS NOTE

Starting footage: 7 vertical clips of train journeys (door view of the ocean, coast road from the window, beach railway, tunnel, Nine Arches Bridge, palm-side train, tea estate) plus a Pixabay music track, uploaded to invideo Editor.

What I asked the agent: I connected invideo's MCP server to Claude and directed it cut by cut: "turn the inside of this door into a portal", "use the real shape of the tunnel hole, not a rectangle", "open all the arch gaps under the bridge", "make the train body the portal, not the sky", "add the same effect to the locomotive". For each one it captured timeline frames, measured the shape and wrote a custom shader transition on the cut: the next clip appears inside the shape, plays, then the camera pushes through. Moving shapes (the approaching locomotive, the drone drift on the bridge) are keyframed, not tracked.

What I refined: I removed the warm glow on the tunnel, rejected versions that didn't look right (a sky cut-out and a floor-drop portal) and had them rebuilt, re-ordered the edit to open on the door shot, swapped in a new clip, and adjusted edge softness, push-through timing and scale using the controls the agent created. After exporting the final MP4 from invideo, I upscaled it with Topaz Astra 2.

LINKS

invideo timeline: https://invideo.io/share/Portal-Cuts-invideo-a2gooqayNEE Instagram post: https://www.instagram.com/reel/DeThWD-SydB/?exln=cDlvNzBucmpvaWps

@invideo.io #invideocontrachallenge #invideoeditor

invideo Editor is free to try.

🎬 Behind the scenes: here's how I built these portal transitions 👇

1️⃣ Uploaded my train clips and music to invideo Editor. 2️⃣ Connected invideo's MCP server to Claude, so it could read and edit my timeline directly. 3️⃣ Directed it cut by cut: "turn this door into a portal",...

A multi-page real estate website concept and a showcase video that walks through the whole site, not just the landing page. The project covers the full buyer journey, from first search to booking a viewing.

The site has five pages:

Home: a clear headline, a search bar for location, property type and budget, featured listings and a trust section with local sales stats.

Listings: a "Homes in Lakeview" page with filter chips, a six-home grid showing price, beds and baths, and a new-listing alerts banner.

Property detail: a photo gallery, price and monthly estimate, key specs, an about section with features, a payment estimate and an agent booking card.

Agents: team profiles, sales stats and the company story.

Contact: a "Book a viewing" form with office details.

The visual identity pairs deep slate with warm amber, a color that reads as home and daylight. Bricolage Grotesque carries the headlines, and Inter Tight handles body text. The listing illustrations are drawn in code, so the layout works before real photography is added.

The video shows the site on a 3D monitor and pedestal in front of a giant parallax wordmark. An animated cursor clicks through the navigation, a progress bar marks each page load, a listing card lifts on hover, and the booking form fills in live until "Request sent" appears. The camera orbits between pages and moves in close at each click so the interface stays readable. A synthesized sound bed with page-change whooshes, click sounds, typing ticks and a success chime completes it.