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VHS Audio Effect
Hi everyone, I’ve managed to achieve a VHS effect in aftereffects by capturing a black screen off a dodgy old VHS tape and then overlaying it on the time line. I have also added a slight wabble as well.
But this is only one half of the effect, I need to do something with the sound. I was also wondering if this is also possible in After Effects, or if I will have to do this in Soundbooth.
Basically what I want to achieve is the slight warble that a bad VHS tape has, where it also seems to speed up and slow down/alter its pitch? I know there is a wiggle expression which you can use, for example on the position of something so that its seems to shake. Would it be possible to use this on audio pitch/speed without loosing sync, or loosing sync too badly?
Many thanks guys.
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13 Replies
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How about a subtle wiggle expression on the time remapping keyframes?
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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I’m really intrigued by this idea. I can see this wiggle on Time Remapping being very interesting for a dream sequence or something. I really want to test it out. Maybe I’ll try it over the weekend before my date on Saturday. Lord knows I’m not gonna get to do it at work. 😛
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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Thanks for the reply guys, I will also have a go at testing out each of your ideas after work today. I’ll report back, hopefully with something good.
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Well I tried it guys, and it worked pretty well. I applied time remapping, and set the first key frames expression to “wiggle(5,1/300)”, this seemed to give quite a subtle wobble and didn’t seem to effect the video too much. I would then probably go ahead and set the one to a slider or something, then I can key how bad the wobble gets at certain places.
Really excited now, I have quite a lot of effects going on in the project. So I’m planning to add them, and some basic colour correction. Export it as a PNG or something, and then import this into AE as one thing and apply all VHS and damage effects. What should be great about this is that I can key how bad the effects get when I want them too!
Fingers crossed all should go well 🙂 Many thanks again guys, made my day! If you have any other ideas, or think there’s a better way to do the wiggle than what I have described please let me know.
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William: I was wondering if you could get in touch with me regarding this effect. I have started a VHS of my own, and I am hoping we can perhaps share some tips on how to get closer to the beloved 80’s look.
Here’s my e-mail:
hobbestheprince(at)yahoo.com
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No need to take it private! The reason for these forums is so that all of us can learn more. If one person has a question, it’s likely that several others have the same. A google search (or the much better custom Google Adobe Community Search will turn this thread up and, with all of our suggestions, help them out.
– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.
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I agree, I just wanted to get a hold of him directly and ask a lot of questions. I’m having some trouble masking in After Effects. What I wanted to do was mask out the top with some fractal noise, to give it the scanline effect, but I’m not quite sure how to do it correctly. A guy on YouTube made a similar look, and he broke it down for me and posted it on the video as well, as to how he did it:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FB8whz9rRDw
I got up to the point of adding Fractal Noise to the mask … I can’t figure out how to do it. As for audio … at least music-wise, if you have a keyboard that allows midi, there is a really good plugin by AudioEase called, “Speakerphone.” A member on YouTube showed some examples of cheesy VHS sounding music with it, and it’s pretty convincing. I am lucky to have a midi keyboard, and will do this once I get the look right. Here is the link for that:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E0iMqdOqymA
Once again, it’s adding the Fractal Noise to a mask that confuses me. Then, he mentions animating that mask, which I am sure I can find in a tutorial, but all masking tutorials I have come across just show how a mask works … like getting rid of a person holding up a green screen, etc. and not how to just isolate the fractal noise to that one specific part of the comp.
As you can tell, I have done a lot of research on this, and this is just my one hang-up unfortunately. Any tips?
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Sorry for the late reply Eric Schuran, I’ll break down what I have done so far.
First off I am working in HD. So even though I wanted a VHS look, I didn’t want to loose detail, so everything I did was with this in mind.
1) First off I’m not sure if this is the best way to do this, but I really wanted to capture some real VHS noise off an old VCR. Unfortunately if I recoded a blank channel on my machine, it just came out as blue which wouldn’t be very good for compositing over the top of my footage. So this is where I probably went a little out of my way from what I really needed to do. Basically I burned off a DVD which was just a blank black screen, 20 minutes of black to be precise. I then hooked the DVD player up to my VCR, started the DVD and set the VCR to record the DVD. This recorded over the top of all the old programs I had on a VHS tape. I then rewound, and connected my old camera to my VCR. Set it to play and started recording. After this I then captured this to my computer, giving me around 20 minutes of VHS noise to play with.
As you can see I went though quite a long complicated process just to get that video, and there are probably easier ways.
I imported into AE, and overlayed the footage on my sequence. At first it didn’t do mum, as the noise on the footage was so slight. So what I had to do was apply curves I think and bring the white (right hand side) all the way down to black on the left, until it was only 10. After I did this I got some really nice noise, including the colours.
I cant remember what transfer mode I used, but I can find out if you want.
2) After all this I was pretty happy, but it still seemed a little static. So I also added a slight wiggle to my sequence below, just like on a VHS. The the only thing I have a problem with after this that wiggle seems to effect horizontal and vertical positions the same, does anyone know how to make one of them effected more/less? Would really appreciate advice on that.
3) Then as I have mentioned above on the posts before, I applied the time remapping and the wiggle effect and I got really nice wobbly VHS sound.
As with all the wiggle effects you can apply a slider to it, and then you can key how much of a wiggle you want. So for example at certain parts in the video I want it to get really damaged, so I plan to cut up my VHS noise Overlay and find some very messy parts. Then I can overlay these on the parts where I need them, and key the audio to get really bad, and the footage to jiggle more.
I should also say that after colour correcting I used magic bullet on the sequence underneath, applying the 70’s cinema filter (at 30%) to my footage.
Hope this helps/
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Did you put the wiggle on the blur only for horizontal? That’s what I did and it worked alright. My problem is getting the static noise going on at the bottom of most VHS tapes.
I really liked your idea of using Magic Bullet for the film grain. I find that the grain in AE alone isn’t really what I want … but this gave me some more inspiration for another project for the future 😉
Have you seen some of those Grindhouse fan trailers? Some of them are pretty interesting, and funny as well. They pulled off the 70’s look very well. When you mentioned the 70’s grain I immediately thought of Grindhouse.
I will try to think of more solutions while working on my own as well … I still can’t wrap my head around masking out one part to have Fractal Noise. 🙁
Be sure to post anything that’s finished as well, I would love to see your results. Can I ask what you are using this for? Is it a cheesy commercial, or horror movie or something? I’ve always loved VHS … I was an 80’s kid 😀
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Hey, no I haven’t put the wiggle on blur. I haven’t used blur at all, I have put the wiggle on the position. Only a tiny bit, but old VHS often travel a bit, or if they’re really chewed up, a lot (up and down). Using the wiggle expression I’m not really sure how you single out each axis, or just apply the effect less to one?
Sorry I didn’t mean Magic Bullet, led you astray there. I’m using Film Magic Pro, and only for the colour effect. I haven’t used any AE noise, or any other plug in noise. I’m only using the noise from the blank VHS footage I captured, and it works very well. I even have that static at the bottom that your talking about. I will try and post and example sometime, but I have haven’t got a lot of time at the moment.
Yeah I love all that stuff. Really want to get the Grindhouse Blu-ray when it comes out 🙂
Of course, the project I’m working on is a very low budget/no budget spoof health and safety video. Basically about working on a building site. Starts off pretty sober, but gradually becomes more and more over the top, lots of gore, and ends with a zombie apocalypse. Pretty standard stuff. We’re trying to do it in the vein of South Park/Naked Gun films (the sense of humour at least). Hopefully we’ll be able to pull it off!
What is your project for if you don’t mind me asking?
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