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old television / vhs dubbed effect…
how do I make some clean footage look as if it was taped in the 80’s off a VHS deck, dubbed by a friend, then by a friend by a friend…?
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8 Replies
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I tried to do this once, by taking out some tape from a VHS casette, crumpling it back up, then playing it back in the player to see if wrinkling the actual tape would help, but alas that is not the case 🙂 The VCR broke and I had to get it repaired. I asked the guy at the repair shop how I could acheive it. He said the best way is just to do it. Duplicate many times between two tapes, and eventually you’ll get it.
I imagine that if you record solid white pixels on a VHS tape, then duplicate that many time, you could use that information as a mask for any clean digital footage, or you could simply use that as a layer and use the transfer modes to interact with clean footage.
Hope that helps!
Arie
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ugh, well unfortunately we dont’ have a VHS deck here..hmm..maybe I can score one. good idea though.
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You could also play with the saturation, blur and such. Here are a few things that come to mind.
Increase the blue in the footage. Add a copy using maybe an overlay transfer mode. Maybe use another layer with chroma key to extract any red, precomp that with a red solid layer (so only the items that were red are showing through), then add that on top of the original footage and blur it, so the red blooms way out of control.
HTH.
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I found this, downloaded the demo and I think it is EXACTLY what you are looking for. However, it is not as authentic as if you were to dub between tapes.
https://www.thefoundry.co.uk/pkg_plugins.aspx?ui=5DD2A940-1D4B-4884-AE22-3FCC03D7530A
Tinderbox 3 > T_BadTV effect.
Good luck,
Arie -
wow. thanks dude. I honestly owe you. like, at least 5 bucks!
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We just don’t know how good we have it with digital, unless you’ve edited with VHS.
VHS (most analog video recording, actually) has some ‘interesting’ characteristics and copies of copies tend to make them worse. Color in VHS is handled as ‘color-under’ from an engineering standpoint. That means it has much less resolution than the luminance – and the luma didn’t have much resolution to start.
Chroma saturation tends to vary all over the map, with reds blooming/smearing and getting very noisy – the noise tended to look almost like noisy horizontal lines of blue. Color also becomes very cartoon-ish, that is to say no subtle gradations. Purples or browns gets the short-shift in NTSC and just about disappears in VHS-NTSC.
Most of the time, a copy of a copy caused the color to shift downward (and sometimes toward the right) from the luma, by a line or two. There was often a whitish or bluish vertical bar down the right side of the image.
Tracking problems in VHS show up as noisy horizontal areas in the picture, maybe occupying 1/4 of the height. Dropouts look like random white horizontal lines about 1/25th of the width of the picture.
VHS always has a noisy line or two a couple of lines from the bottom of the pic, where the head switches to the next frame. The switch point dithered or ‘danced’ back and forth a bit. Multi-copies would have several of these. Most copy-of-a-copy-of-a-copy will have a “hook” in the top of the picture where the upper 10% or so of the picture will be skewed to the right or to the left, or even flag-wave back and forth. The edges of multi-copied tapes also had ripples or flag-waving. The head-switching sometimes caused the whole image to bounce up or down by a line or two.
Sound was pretty low-fi with maybe an 6-8K upper cutoff. Most VHS recorders use automatic volume control and by the third or fourth generation, the sound was pretty compressed. Or even breathing a bit.
There are plug-ins that have been mentioned that do at least some of these effects. You could probably duplicate most of them with the standard AE effects.
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Try this for a starting point:
– Curves (to bring up some blue color)
– Fast Blur 4 pixels
– Unsharp Mask: amount150, Radius 6
– Wave Warp: type=Smooth noise; Wave height=6; ; width=100; direction=0; and a fast Wave speed, Pinning on all edges/
– Maybe a second Wave Warp with normal noise; and a small heightWave Warp is pretty slow to render alas.
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I recently created a video tutorial for AE that shows you how to do this:
Best of all, it’s free…
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Aharon Rabinowitz
aharon(AT)yahoo(DOT)com
http://www.allbetsareoff.com
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Creative Cow Master Series DVD
particleIllusion Fusion Volume 1
available @ http://www.pIllusionFusion.com
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