Camera blending effects

I'm not sure if this question is still in the scope of Cinemachine but I guess I'd ask.

So blending - in the sense of interpolating - between vcams is pretty easy.
But is there a recommended way to also do visual blending effects (fade to black, scrolling a mask over...)?

At the moment I do this using an UGUI Canvas and an Image component. That works great (modifying the position of the image, and its alpha, depending on what kind of effect I need) so far, but I was wondering if there is another way now. This method also can't do alpha-blending between two cameras.

Especially consistency is a concern to me; reusing the elements of cutscenes (to make sure the same kind of blending, blend-timing, ... is used for every cutscene). Am I on the right track with thinking that the timeline is the way to go here (where I'd just replace the bindings for each character in the cutscene)?
What I have in mind is a dialog cutscene that shows to characters talking to each other. But this kind of interaction can happen between many different characters, and the way the camera goes into the cutscene and shows the different characters should always be consistent.

Now that I've wrote that, I guess my question bit twofold. One part concerning camera blending and the other recycling cutscenes. Let me know if the second part is more applicable to the timeline forum and then I'll post it there