VHS Video effect final cut pro x – How to

[Nikolas Bäurle]

I can’t see the video since its not available in Germany.
You could use the Bad TV filter in Motion, you can also publish it to make available in X.
There’s also a lot of plugins for video defects or old video looks. Motion VFX or Pixel Film Studios have a bunch.

[Nate Weaver]

I’ve had good luck with a stack of filters, each modeling one artifact of cameras of that age. Also, do them in this order in the filter stack:

1-Add a little noise. Old consumer cameras are noisy. I mean a little.

2-Gaussian blur, maybe 3 pixels. Old cameras are low resolution. Really low. Maybe even 4 pixels.

3-Color correction: Clip the whites, and clip or raise blacks to taste. Bump saturation. Maybe add a orange or blue color cast to make it look like operator screwed up white balance.

4-Sharpening: Add a lot of sharpening. Old cameras were really low res and added sharpening to try to cover it up. This might seem stupid after softening the image with a blur two steps ago, but it’s key to the look.

5-Bad TV filter: Now you can add static, bad tracking, FX because they were coming from the VHS tape and not from the camera, so those artifacts should be last. In particular, look for a slider called “Color Sync”. Lot of VHS players had chroma sync issues, this will replicate that.

6-Crop to 4:3 aspect. Duh. 🙂

Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net

[Nate Weaver]

Following images were originally 5D2 clips, used the above method on them. I wanted a very heavy look on them as a contrast with the pristine Red footage they were being intercut with. Backing off the Gaussian Blur and the sharpening can mellow the look:

Nate Weaver
Director/D.P., Los Angeles
https://www.nateweaver.net