The Rise Of The Dansby Cubs Baseballs Fresh Wave Shining Through Cubs Blue Uniforms

What This Is and Why It Exists

The Rise Of The Dansby Cubs Baseballs Fresh Wave Shining Through Cubs Blue Uniforms is a fan-driven visual project that layers a custom shimmer or refraction effect onto archival and modern footage of Dansby Swanson in his Chicago Cubs navy blue jerseys. It started as a simple editing experiment someone posted on Instagram reels, then blew up when a couple of baseball video creators stitched together a longer piece with color-grading work and motion tracking. Now it shows up across multiple platforms as different versions, each using slightly different techniques. Most of the popular versions follow the same basic pipeline. Someone takes clean footage of Swanson playing shortstop or fielding grounders in Wrigley Field, strips out the uniform area using rotoscoping or a mask, applies a wave distortion or iridescent shader over the blue fabric, then composites it back into the original shot. The result makes the blue jersey look like it has a subtle light-refraction or wet-surface glow moving across it. I've rebuilt this effect from scratch three separate times now, using different software and source footage. Here is the straightforward breakdown of how people are actually doing it.

The Pipeline, Step By Step

1. Source footage selection

Start with clean, high-resolution broadcast footage. Anything under 1080p will fall apart once you stretch a wave distortion across it. The Cubs' official MLB channel uploads full broadcast clips after games. YouTube also has archived broadcasts, but compression artifacts show up fast when you apply heavy post-processing. If you want better quality, request footage through the MLB Media portal, which provides higher bitrates for credentialed creators. The best shots are ones where Swanson is visible from a medium or medium-long frame. Close-ups of just his torso work too, but edge tracking gets messy with extreme close camera angles. Field-level camera shots from second base or third base angle tend to give the cleanest uniform visibility.

2. Rotoscoping the uniform area

This is the part most people rush and then regret. You need to isolate the blue jersey from the rest of the frame. DaVinci Resolve's Magic Mask works well for still subjects, but Swanson moves fast. For action sequences, I recommend running the clip through Mocha AE or Mocha Pro and building a planar tracker point on the jersey area. Planar tracking stays locked even when the camera pans, which is more reliable than manual keyframing. My workaround for a problem I ran into last year: I was working with footage that had a rain delay overlay at the bottom of the screen. The tracking data got contaminated because the overlay moved independently. I masked out the overlay region first, ran the tracker on the clean upper portion of the frame, then re-imported the overlay after the tracking pass was complete. That saved me about forty minutes of rebuilding masks by hand.

3. Applying the wave effect

There are two main approaches here. The first is a displacement map using an animated sine wave or noise function. The second is a custom shader that simulates light passing through fabric. The shader route looks more natural but requires more technical setup. The displacement route is faster and easier to control. For the displacement method, create an animated noise layer. Set it to fractal or turbulence noise, not simplex. Fractal noise gives a more organic, irregular pattern that mimics how light actually catches on textured fabric. Adjust the scale so the wave spans roughly the width of the jersey panel, not individual threads. Then plug that into a displacement or warp effect on the uniform mask layer. The key is keeping the displacement amount low—anywhere between 3 and 8 pixels. Go higher and it starts looking like a water reflection instead of a shimmer on cloth. For the shader approach, use an iridescence or thin-film interference shader. This simulates the physics of light refracting through layered material. In Nuke, you can build this with a Fresnel node combined with a wavelength-based color shift. In Blender's compositor, the ColorRamp and HueSaturation nodes can approximate the same effect if you feed them a moving gradient. Both methods add a slight rainbow edge to the uniform without turning it into a full hologram.

4. Color matching and integration

This step separates amateur edits from professional-looking ones. The effect has to match the lighting conditions of the original footage. If the game was filmed under overcast sky at 2 PM, the shimmer should be soft and diffused. If it was night under stadium lights, the effect needs stronger specular response. Use a curves adjustment to match the luminance of the treated uniform area to adjacent non-treated areas like the pants or sleeves. Then run a slight chromatic aberration pass on just the effect layer to break up any digital sharpness. A low amount—1 or 2 pixels on the RGB channels—makes it read as part of the image instead of something stuck on top.

5. Output and delivery

Render at the source resolution with a high bitrate. H.264 at 40 Mbps or higher for 1080p, or ProRes 422 for archival purposes. Compression at default settings will smear the wave distortion in the darker blue areas of the uniform and make the whole thing look muddy. The biggest mistake I see people make is applying the effect globally across the entire frame instead of isolating it to the uniform. The wave distortion only looks right on the fabric. When it spreads to skin, grass, or the dirt infield, the effect immediately reads as a mistake. Another issue is temporal stability. If the wave parameter jumps between frames, the effect flickers. Always use easing functions on your animation curves. Even a small ease-in and ease-out on the displacement intensity keeps the shimmer looking continuous rather than strobing.

Don't ignore motion blur. If the original footage has motion blur on fast swings or throws and your effect layer is razor sharp, it will pop out. Apply a motion blur pass to the effect composite that matches the shutter angle of the source footage.

Tools Worth Using

DaVinci Resolve Studio for the rotoscoping and color work. The price is reasonable and the tracking is solid. Mocha AE if you already have After Effects, since it integrates directly. Blender's compositor for the shader-based approach if you want more control over the iridescence. Nuke is overkill unless you are doing this professionally for a client. For quick social media versions, CapCut and Premiere Pro's built-in effects can get you 80 percent of the way there, but the edge quality will suffer compared to the heavier software. MLB owns the broadcast footage. If you are making this for personal practice, go ahead. If you plan to publish it on any platform with monetization, you will need permission or you need to use footage that is clearly marked as fair-use commentary. The Cubs organization and MLB have been active about taking down unauthorized uses of game footage, especially when the edited version is monetized or presented as official content. I learned this the hard way when a version I made with broadcast footage got a DMCA strike after three weeks of posting. Switch to publicly available highlight clips from the official MLB YouTube channel, which carry a Creative Commons attribution license, and you avoid the whole problem. Fractal noise scale: 0.3 to 0.5. Displacement amount: 3 to 8 pixels. Wave speed: 0.5 to 1.5 frames per second. Chromatic aberration: 1 to 2 pixels. Color grading match: use a reference patch from the original uniform area sampled frame by frame. Render codec: H.264 high bitrate or ProRes 422.

This process usually takes between 45 minutes and two hours per minute of final output, depending on how much motion tracking cleanup is needed. The first version I made took me about six hours because I was still learning the tracking workflow. The third version, using the same source footage, took me about forty minutes. Practice on the process matters more than any single tool choice.