Video Trails V2

Video Trails V2 is what happens when you take the first version and stop being polite about it. The original Video Trails gives you afterimages - ghosts of whatever moved in your clip. This one adds the thing people actually want from that effect: proper RGB channel separation, so your trails break apart into red, green, and blue streaks like an old CRT going out of sync. If you've ever wanted your motion trails to look like a bad VHS dub from 1994, this is the node.

It ships in DJZ-Nodes alongside the V1, and honestly it's the one I'd reach for. Once you've seen color-broken trails, monochrome ghosting is hard to go back to.

What changed over V1

The headline difference is per-channel motion detection. V1 ran optical flow on the frame as a whole; V2 runs it on each RGB channel independently. That's what creates the color separation - the red channel's ghost drifts differently from the blue's, and where they overlap you get fringing that reads as chromatic aberration. It's a small architectural change with a big visual payoff, and it means the color effect isn't faked with a post-pass; it's the natural output of the motion analysis.

V2 also swaps the fade math for exponential decay (decay_rate instead of fade_speed). Trails now die off smoothly rather than linearly, which reads more natural - a fast-moving highlight leaves a long bright tail that thins out as it fades.

The inputs that matter

Same single images input, and the knob layout is recognizably a sibling of V1:

• trail_strength (0.1–0.99, default 0.85) - how long trails persist, the direct heir of V1's persistence.
• decay_rate (0.01–0.5, default 0.15) - how fast those trails fade. Higher = trails that snap back to clean; lower = long lingering streaks.
• color_bleed (0–1, default 0.3) - the star of the show. This controls how far the RGB channels separate. At 0.1 it's a subtle fringe; push toward 1 and you get full rainbow breakup on every moving edge.
• blur_amount (0–2, default 0.5) - Gaussian smoothing on the trail buffer. Above 1.0 things get properly dreamy.
• threshold (0.01–0.5, default 0.1) - motion sensitivity. Same job as V1's motion_threshold; lower picks up subtler motion, higher ignores camera noise.

Output is an IMAGE batch, one modified frame per input. Straight into a Video Combine and you're exporting.

Installing it

It's part of the DJZ-Nodes pack, so it's a pack-level install:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/MushroomFleet/DJZ-Nodes
cd DJZ-Nodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

Restart after. ComfyUI Manager users: search "DJZ-Nodes" in the install tab. Watch the dependency install - opencv-python and friends make the first install slow, but everything here is CPU-side, so no models to download.

Troubleshooting

• Color bleed looks broken / gray. color_bleed at 0.0 disables channel separation entirely - you're basically running V1 at that point. If you want the chromatic breakup, it needs to be above ~0.15.
• Trails reset. Same stateful behavior as V1: the buffer accumulates across the whole batch. Feed one continuous batch, not chopped-up segments, or the effect restarts.
• Static background glows. That's threshold too low picking up encode noise. Nudge it up and the background goes quiet.

Worth the upgrade over V1 if color is your thing. If you just want clean afterimages with no fringing, V1 is simpler - but you're leaving the fun on the table.