[ VHS Tutorial ] - How I make my VHS filters

so one question I get asked a lot is how I create my VHS effect for all of my videos and because I'd like to share that knowledge with you today I'm going to make a tutorial on how to do that but the first thing we're going to need is animation so I'm going to whip up an animation and you guys are going to watch okay so I'll be right back [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] we're all done now we have a little animation of our little vintage toy cupcake here just looking around and then exposing those little endoskeleton teeth because I don't know I just figured do something you know I want to know what he looks like without his uh his little cupcake here this is when his endoskeleton looks like look at that look at look at his bulging eyes something straight out of Ice Age you know what I mean so there is a VHS effect that I use it's a blender node plug-in essentially someone made a compositing node in a blender project and then they made it accessible to the public I found it on a video I'll show you the video right now so this is the video this is a blender VHS effect but you come down to the description here and you got a link to a Dropbox once you download that you're gonna get a zip file once you open the zip file you're going to get a folder with a project a blender project file now this is important because what you can do is you can either render out the whole animation you can actually use any video clip you can put the video clip into the project and have the compositing node just do the do the rest for you and you can render it out I personally since I do 3D animation I normally like to make sure that I put the compositing node inside this blender project but I'll show you what the other version looks like first so normally you're going to open up the project file and you're just going to have the video editor and the compositor these are just the main two that you want right now the video editor isn't actually that important because all it's really for is so that way you can drag whatever project file you have put it down into the timeline on the channel one you're gonna put it right at the very beginning so that way you're right at the first frame then you're gonna go all the way down to the end of your clip and you're gonna figure out what the number of that frame is in my case with this video that I tested it was a 1965 frames so I put that as the end marker so that way I know when the render has to stop so when you add it what's important is uh once you delete it you're gonna have to make sure that you delete this top video clip because once you delete that if you leave the top layer in then you're just going to end up with the normal video without the effect for right now we don't need that all we're going to focus on is the compositor so now that you have the however long your video is going to be the length of it now that you have your audio in place you're just simply going to go to here this is your movie clip it's already going to be set up for you but right here is the movie clip and you're going to scroll through your computer to find whatever clip that you want to put the effect on it's going to be in there since it's the same one you know how long the video is going to be then this right here is the VHS effect node now you have everything from your your color streaks to your color loss the noise all the effects are right here we'll go ahead and even do a little test here this already has an effect but this is what it looks like with the VHS effect you can even grab through here you can see that the VHS effect is already on top of there and then what you can do is you go ahead into the output start naming your your project whatever it is you can choose whether or not you want it to be rendered out as a video or if you want it to be rendered out as image frames image sequences so that way when you put it into your video editor you don't have to worry about picking a specific frame or if there's a one frame that's messed up you can always go back and just render out that specific frame without having to do the whole video again uh and that's pretty much it if you're just doing a video and you just want to put the effect on this is what you do video editing drag it down make sure you have the right length of your video in my case I I forgot to shorten it down you're going to go here to your movie clip select the movie file set your your parameters for whatever you want for any of these these little things here and then you're gonna set up your output and click control F12 whatever it is to render just render out your video and it'll have the effect on there but for someone like me you could go ahead open the project file that you had for your animation if you're doing a blender animation you're gonna go to append you're going to search for your VHS effect folder with the project open up your project file and you're going to search for node trees now node trees is going to show the node for the effect so you're going to click that append it and then here in the compositing tab we're going to just add our BHS pick by pressing shift a and then search up BHS and here is your VHS effect for whenever you need it we'll even go as far as to add the viewer node do you render out any image just to see what it looks like this is what you're going to be end up with you're going to end up with your image with the VHS effect and here are the parameters you want to maybe turn off color blur maybe you want to turn off this maybe you want to have it not sharpened at all maybe you want the color loss to be zero so that way there's no color you can change and tweak all of these effects for me personally I I'd like to have my my color my color in there and then we'll just add a blending of three I think looks fine sharpen it by one have a the color blur is fine the distort Factor can be turned up just a bit once you're done with your animation you could render it out just like this you can have your VHS compositing and render it out but me personally I like to take it a step further with my VHS effect and I'm going to show you that using DaVinci Resolve okay so that took about almost an hour to render because I needed to change some settings and this is the final result [Music] so back to our editing software and DaVinci Resolve we have an example of one of the packs that I have with a VHS overlay this is the overlay on top of our video and if we just go over here this is the inspector if anyone's never used DaVinci Resolve it is rather easy to use but I would recommend watching some tutorials um right now I'm in the editing tab and I have my media pool open I have the effects open and I have my inspector open so an inspector if you come down here there's compositing you have a bunch of different options you can just have it on ad to be honest it all also depends on what you're looking for too because you can get away with any one of these and just that's what you're going for but for right now I'm just gonna go with ADD and so now we have a bit more detail and static onto our VHS footage we want to take it a step further depending on what you're going for over here in effects I have a ton of save there's one in open effects that's called jpeg damage now jpeg damage is a free effect and what that essentially does is you can already see it gives it a bit of a posterized effect but if you just crank some of these up just a bit you get a bit of these harsh pixels that kind of damage the footage visit authentic well kinda but it really depends I normally like to use it for glitches because if you can scale this down you can see you can get some pretty interesting glitches by just changing these effects here even sharpening it gives oh God oh God I think we're gonna delete that another thing that I would also kind of recommend is there's a free Effect called camera Shake but what we can do with that and actually what I want to do before we get into putting any effects onto our clip you want to go over here to effects above open effects you're going to put the adjustment clip right above your actual footage don't worry about the don't worry about the your VHS overlay that's going to go on top but this adjustment clip can go across all of your footage even if it's separate clips and what you're going to do is you're going to put all of your effects on to the adjustment clip and what that's going to do is it's going to apply all those effects to anything that's underneath it but once you get rid of it it doesn't affect anything so that's so that way you don't have to keep copy and pasting all these same effects on there because I can get a bit exhausting but for the camera shake what we're going to do is first thing we're going to do is we're going to put pan this pan altitude down to zero we're gonna put rotation down to zero we're gonna put the PTR speed all the way up we're going to put the Tilt altitude just a bit just a bit maybe at like one point one five we're going to put the the speed scale all the way up we're gonna put that motion around 0.5 down here motion method we're going to choose Square wave down here at blanking handling we're going to screw that all the way down and we're going to choose replicate for the Border type so that way essentially what the Border type is is whenever the the movement of your shot Jitters too much and you end up seeing uh past the clip it's gonna be black but instead of it being black we're gonna have it replicate so that way it kind of glitches and stretches some of the pixels to replicate what would be Beyond The Border uh we can also scale any of these up the randomness the speed the pause length the pause intervals the pulse Randomness we can crank that all the way up if we want to and what we get is this slight Jitter that's also randomized which is what normal VHS you know has it has a bit of a Jitter this is a bit too much so we can actually scale this down so that way it's 0.1 and now you have a bit of a Jitter now there is also an effect called film grain film grain is exactly what you think it is it's an effect that adds grain to your film now we're going to crank the opacity of it all the way up we're going to crank that strength all the way up uh we don't always have to put saturation I put saturation just a little bit maybe even softened the the grain just a bit we could crank it down a bit though because the grain doesn't need to be entirely intense like it doesn't need to be that big we don't need that we just need to be just just a small the smallest little thing that's fine right there however if you go to soft light I think soft light is a bit more subtle when it comes to the grain and now you have a bit of static and gray which is a bit much you don't have to do it it can be Overkill you can take that away and you're left with just the digital damage from the the VHS blender plug-in um so we'll get rid of that from now now the other thing I want to talk to you guys about is an effect in the paid version of DaVinci Resolve Studio I'll just go ahead and say that DaVinci Resolve for it being free comes with a lot of effects but what it does come with in the paid version has become very helpful to me you don't need it and if you don't feel like you're ever going to need it in the future I honestly don't recommend that you buy it but it is a one-time purchase unlike Adobe you know what I'm saying Adobe having you know monthly subscriptions for everything not one-time purchases really wow that's why I don't use Adobe I use the free program but on top of that I use the one-time purchase program and what DaVinci Resolve Studio has is a paid Effect called analog damage what that does if I put that there you can already kind of see where this is going this is an effect that was literally made for me it wasn't even there until I started using VHS stuff and this has become soulmate because if we look over here the presets we have clean VHS is what it's on take that away this is what you you're left with right early television oh my God nowhere early television you have you want 1960s black and white you got 1960s black and white you want 1960s color you got 1960s color you want to go ahead and have 1970s boom 1970s instant perfect 1980s okay I mean it could be more authentic but still pretty good 1990s look at that look at the clean VHS look at the old VHS kind of weird look at the old the security camera is probably one of my favorites the weight this looks so many things that you can do with all these presets and yet there's so much more you can do with all of these tabs here and I'm just going to start with a clean slate because there's a lot of things that that end up messing this up so if we take just the clean preset with nothing else applied honestly we don't even need to do this part using the analog damage because we already have the blender plug-in but I'm just going to show you what it looks like anyways if you go down here I like to start at the bottom VHS what we're going to do we're going to take the offset turn the offset to zero we're going to turn that Jitter up the the Restless foot Jitter and then we're going to change this Restless foot height we're going to crank that to the negatives until you start seeing that little that little foot down at the bottom down right here Crank that up just a bit and now you have a Jitter at the bottom we can crank this up even a bit so that we Jitters a lot we could take it a step further go to scan up here we don't have to worry about any of these right now scan line if you want to know what that is that's pretty much the the CRT scan lines you can even colorize them you can even sharpen them but we don't need that we don't need them for right now we're just worrying about scan if we take this this vertical blank essentially what that is if I if I scale this right here you can see these little bars where the footage would be connecting with itself we're just gonna take that down to zero and we'll fix this here and actually with the V scale we'll put it just a little bit so that way the bottom Edge starts to appear at the top and the top Edge starts to appear at the bottom it's just something that I like to do and now with this border here we can go to over scan let's do a little that a little bit of that until you see this white line here for the Border although I kind of like it to where you do it just just before that just before that border become here to color we could change the tint and that kind of changes the look of it depending on what you're going for uh it's both sides are actually pretty interesting but we don't need that right now you can mess with all the colors in pretty much the the color tab but over here this is also important forget about this this top one right here I don't care about that broadcast signal this this is where a lot of the magic happens because if we take this this signal noise and we Crank that up the film grain that we were trying to do before is a part of this and what can we do with this well we can change the noise scale and if we change it all the way down to 0.5 you can see the image starts to lose its quality as opposed to if you scale it all the way up the image actually gains more quality so that's fun that you can have film grain what about color noise you want some a bit of color noise in there that's so that way it's not just black and white sure we can give you some color noise although it's a bit hideous but you can still have color noise detail loss is pretty important because you don't always see there being a whole lot of sharp detail in your actual VHS footage so cranking this just a bit sells it the lack of detail in the VHS effect uh with chrome detail that is essentially how you get the color bleeding where the colors kind of step outside their bounds and if we crank this up you can kind of see the pink and the the Browns start to come outside of the bounds of the cupcake but we can just have it to where it sticks out just a bit ghosting and ghosting offset are pretty interesting if you put the ghosting all the way here you can see there's a second image that's black and white that is also offset because of the the ghosting offset if we put it all the way down to here it's a negative photo of your image that's in black and white and if we take that offset and put it right just barely next to it you can kind of kind of get this embossing effect so emboss uh I can show you actually here in one of the effects in open effects there is an effect all the way down at the bottom called emboss now in bot I'm not sure if I'm saying that right but in boss if you put that down the image is gone just kidding if you go over here to your inspector emboss and we click the emboss style to emboss over and we Crank that all the way up we also have to put that above analog damage but you can kind of see that without it there's this Edge or with it the edge starts to appear it actually starts to sharpen the image a bit but uh it's more of just putting almost an edge a light edge and a dark Edge so you can even see the angle of it start to change depending on where I move this angle but let's say you don't want to add that effect on there you just want to stick to your your analog damage in the broadcast signal in ghosting like I said if you put that there and you crank this all the way until it's barely sticking out you can get the same embossing effect which I think is pretty neat so with all that in mind you come out with this my personal VHS effect using both the blender plugin and using DaVinci resolves analog damage which again you have to pay for the studio version but you also get a ton of other stuff besides just the analog damage and this is our this is what we're left with but it's not the only way that you can do a VHS effect and I'll share with we I'll holy crap I'll share with you what I mean okay so I basically re-rendered the whole video without the blender plug-in without the VHS effect so this is what it looks like bare bone without any effect on it now what we're going to do we render it out as an mp4 once you render it out as an mp4 and we're going to need to convert this into an Avi for this other authentic VHS filter I'm going to be using the X media record but you can honestly use whatever video converter you want handbrake is another good one but uh what we're gonna do is once I have it in here I need to add it to the queue and I'm going to have the destination be the same places where I had the other video make sure that the format is being converted into an Avi that's very important convert it into an Avi and to create the other authentic VHS filter we are going to be using something called an Avi synth I'll leave the link down in the description for the Avi synth once you download it because you're going to have to download it and you're gonna have to extract everything into a folder so make sure you have the folder and extract everything into that folder and what you're left with is a folder that looks like this this is what it's going to look like I have a couple of test videos already in here but don't worry about those what we're going to need to do we're going to take the Avi video we're gonna put it in the folder that you just made I'm gonna put it in there so now we have our video make sure you also name it something that's easy or just make sure you remember that name uh you can even go ahead and copy the name Ctrl C copy the name of that video that you just put make sure it's dot Avi then this effect dot AVS when you open that up what we're going to do right at this line here right where you have the parentheses and the quotes and then the dot Avi you this is from an older test that I did you're gonna take that name and you're going to replace it with the name of the video so this has to be identical to your video file name with DOT Avi we're going to save this you're gonna see down here virtual dub.exe we're going to take the effect we're going to drag it into virtual dub.exe once you do that you're gonna see this screen and if we press this second play button here it's gonna start playing and now what we have is that this folder or this virtual dub.exe added a VHS effect on top of it and it is pretty realistic but it's not really my cup of tea I kind of prefer the blender one over this one but I want you guys to keep in mind something so if you pay attention to the beginning here it says play at the top corner and then it says play LP n t c or SC whatever whatever that is that's going to be at the beginning of your video unfortunately the blue screen and the overlay of the word play is going to be overlaid on top of your video and I don't like that as authentic as I'd want to make that I don't care for that I actually want it without that so give yourself five seconds between the start of your actual video that you want to convert into a VHS effect take the five seconds and let it be nothing just leave nothing there so that way when it does that that overlay of uh the play and TSC whatever it is you want to make sure that's not in your video if you don't want it there uh this also does affect sound so I didn't I didn't have any sound here but what this does is it also takes the sound of your video into account and it'll convert that to sound more like a VHS I'll make another video on how you can make all your audio sound like a VHS or you know outdated a bit low quality but for now this is how you can create the other effect and what you can do once you're done with it you're gonna go up here save as Avi now since DaVinci Resolve does not allow imported videos of dot Avi we're going to have to convert this back into an mp4 so we'll close that for now we're going to take it into our converter and we're going to convert this back into an mp4 render out now it's done we're going to go back into DaVinci Resolve and we're going to drag our new video clip so now that we're done I can show you the comparison between all the different effects first you have basically what it looks like without any effects then you can have the blender VHS effect you can even have the blender and DaVinci Resolve VHS effect or you can have the Avi synth VHS effect you let me know in the comments which one is your favorite I personally have a preference but now you know how to do a VHS effect just like I do so let me know in the future if there's anything else that you're curious about on what I do because I'm willing to do a couple other tutorials this is the first time I've done it and this is actually the third time I've had to do this tutorial and had to redo it because I just am so bad at tutorials uh but anyways I hope this was helpful thank you guys so much for watching uh let me know if there are any questions I'll answer any questions and I'll see you guys next time catch you later [Music] thank you [Music] foreign [Music]

Channel: Battington

Views: 618,801

Keywords: Tutorial, VHS

Id: 7hZkyp5vmMc

Length: 26min 35sec (1595 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 31 2023