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Activity Forums Adobe After Effects old VHS effects…

  • old VHS effects…

    Posted by Mrshow555 on December 31, 2006 at 11:00 pm

    What’s the best way to re-create the effect of an old vhs tape. You know like when you used to edit home movies as a kid with two vcrs so each time you dubbed you lost quality? Here’s an example clip of an actual old vhs clip of the kind of effect i’m going for…

    [url=https://media.putfile.com/vhs-FX]Click here to watch vhs-FX[/url]
    https://media.putfile.com/vhs-FX

    Jim Arcon replied 19 years, 4 months ago 4 Members · 3 Replies
  • 3 Replies
  • Majorasshole

    January 1, 2007 at 1:52 am

    Why would you want to undo 20 years of technical advances in video?
    run it through a vhs deck while wiggling a loose coaxial cable and re record your footage.

    It will be done in real time, or buy the “bad tv” plugin, or spend time to replicate the same thing in AE with a ton of layered effects. Analyze what you see in the footage and then pick out how to recreate that using AEs features.

    I spent 2 seconds of analyzing that footage, you could recreate it like this:
    Make a blue screen, make a black bar, make an adjustment layer with distortion applied to it, make a static noise layer, seperate the r g and b layers and move them horizontally out of phase etc etc etc. Edit between these.

  • Mylenium

    January 1, 2007 at 10:13 am

    Like Arson said – separate the color channels using Shift Channel, add Noise and other effects to them separately, then blend them back together by overlaying them in Add mode. For fast forward effects you may also consider using the Time Displacement effect to get the streaky look with some parts of the immage seeming to lag behind.

    Mylenium

    [Pour Myl

  • Jim Arcon

    January 1, 2007 at 3:15 pm

    Older consumer VHS often used a one-tube camera that performed very poorly as the light went down.

    In addition to what the others have said, soften (blur) each of the colors a bit – red was usually the worse than the others. The blue channel was always very noisy, so add more noise into the blue. The camera would smear any bright highlights when it moved. Most would have a lot of image lag in very low light. You can simulate this with time displacement. Yhe edges of the picture were not clearly defined.

    If I remember correctly, VHS also tended to shift the colors down a line from the luminance.

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