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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects How can I achieve this “corrupt compression” effect?

  • How can I achieve this “corrupt compression” effect?

    Posted by Tom Darracott on September 23, 2008 at 11:22 am

    First of all apologies if this is in the wrong section, I just posted in the compression forum but just noticed this section which is perhaps more appropriate…

    I’m trying to achieve this effect for a piece I am creating, it is a print piece so it will be stills rather than moving image.

    Movie glitch

    I believe this glitchy kind of distortion is caused by bad compression or conversion somehow, does anyone know a way of how this effect can be replicated at all? I was hoping to take grabs of existing footage and “force it” to corrupt in this way.

    I have been trying things such as converting footage to mpeg4 and then playing back in VLC whilst srubbing the playback head hoping to achieve this effect but its not really working.

    Anyone have any ideas at all?

    Many thanks in advance

    Tom

    Mark Suszko replied 17 years, 7 months ago 4 Members · 6 Replies
  • 6 Replies
  • Stephen Smith

    September 23, 2008 at 12:51 pm

    In your photo editing application, such as Photoshop. I would cut the image up so you could effect different layers of the same image. Add Blend Modes. Mess with the emboss filter and add some random stuff to the photo as well. Hope this helps.

    Salt Lake Video

    Check out my DVD Money Making Graphics & Effects for Final Cut Studio 2

  • Tom Darracott

    September 23, 2008 at 12:57 pm

    Many thanks for the reply. I was hoping that rather than creating the effect in photoshop I would be able to force the glitches to occur in a video clip so that the end result was a “happy accident” rather than something that had been composed in photoshop.

    I reckon it would be pretty simple to recreate in photoshop but what i really like about the sample image is the pure randomness of the distortion, the way its the result of a technical glitch rather than being “authored”

    Do you think this may be possible to achieve?

    Thanks again

  • Stephen Smith

    September 23, 2008 at 1:17 pm

    Tom,
    I see what your saying. That I’m not sure about. I’m curious to see what others think.

    Salt Lake Video

    Check out my DVD Money Making Graphics & Effects for Final Cut Studio 2

  • Nel Santiago

    September 23, 2008 at 3:32 pm

    Short of launching all your apps and hoping that your video player starts running out of memory…which I would NOT suggest. I don’t know of any other way of doing that without building a template to process the video. Maybe a jpeg damage plug-in?

    Took me a while to find it, but I pulled a file I had done a while back. It was used to simulate the look of a webcam. While it’s not exactly what you are looking for it might be a way to get you started. Here is a sample of a clip in the template for reference.
    https://www.forbiddensky.com/zips/MPEG_Damage_sample.mov

    I went ahead and made some quick notes. If it’s useful cool, if not that’s all I got 🙂 Funny how the things we try to avoid like that compression breakdown are sometimes the hardest to replicate.

    here is the AE file (footage is for reference only)
    https://www.forbiddensky.com/zips/MPEG_Distort_Project.zip

    maybe someone else might have a better solution?

    -N

    https://www.ForbiddenSky.com

  • Tom Darracott

    September 23, 2008 at 3:47 pm

    Hi Nel

    Thanks a lot for you reply. I checked your movie and thats roughly the same kind of effect I had managed to get using time displacement in AE (I couldn’t check your source file as I’m working in an old copy of AE, I’m normally a print guy!).

    You’re entirely right, replicating those lucky accidents is always tricky! I may have to use a combination of AE and photoshop to cheat the effect, but hopefully someone may be able to point me in the right direction.

    cheers, Tom

  • Mark Suszko

    September 24, 2008 at 1:36 pm

    Have you tried manually fast-forwarding and reversing a tape while digitizing it, and layering that back over the normal one? There’s also a visual synthesizer program or two out there that you might want to look into playing with, some of them let you work with live video. Check this out:

    https://www.synthetik.com/

    Studio Artist. I have an early free copy and it can do some awesome things in the hands of an actual artist.

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