How to Get the VHS Look in Premiere Pro | Video Editing Tips

hey guys it's Charles Jagger with premium beat.com in this tutorial I'm going to show you how to create a realistic VHS look entirely inside a premier Pro alright guys as I mentioned we're gonna be creating this VHS look entirely inside of Premiere Pro no round tripping over to After Effects or anything like that I even have a method for us to add a subtle wiggle to our footage to kind of emulate the imperfections that are common on VHS videos before we get started though I do want to mention that you should download the project file for this tutorial that project file includes some VHS accents and only using a little bit later on and it includes some free VHS presets that you can install but before we get to that let's go ahead and started creating this VHS look on some footage all right inside the Premiere Pro I've got a clip here already on my timeline that's gonna be the clip I'm going to add the VHS to look to so the first effect we need is the gloomy tree color effect so under video effects I'm down here under color correction and we're gonna select lumetri color just add that onto the clip and you should see the effects controls here now we can see the limit recolor effect we can go through here and adjust these various parameters to create the VHS look the first thing we need to adjust is under the basic correction tab here go ahead and toggle that down and what we're gonna do first we're gonna add a little more contrast on this footage VHS Clips tend to have more contrast I'm gonna set this somewhere around 55 or so and we can see there just helps to take away some of that flat appearance next we need just the white level I'll go ahead and select this and I'll move this up and down you can see if we bring that down a lot of times VHS it's not gonna have that really bright white quality like this like when I see this I think of like HDR or modern televisions so we want to bring this down and something like negative 50 you can see just kind of adds a dull white over everything there and we go ahead and close up the basic correction and let's go ahead and toggle down the creative tab now under the Nutri color and the next option i want to just is faded film I'm gonna set this to you about 30 you can see it's just gonna lift the blacks they're kind of subtle you can push it to be more extreme if you want you really can adjust these to any settings you want I'm just gonna kind of show you the settings add dolly and create my VHS look someone set this faded film to 30 next for sharpen VHS is kind of a double edged sword who you think of VHS kind of being overly sharp but compared to like HD footage you know it really isn't that sharp but I'm gonna show you a way we can kind of dull it and then kind of add that extra bit of sharpening back onto the footage a little bit later it'll give it more of a VHS aesthetic so right now for the sharpen right here I'm actually gonna say this to be 70s is gonna kind of add a Dobler over everything there and BHS tends do not have the best color either so for vibrance we're gonna set this to be negative 30 now this next adjustments really more of a preference of mind what I'd like to do is take the shadow tin to move it just a little bit over into kind of that purple hues you can see it just has a little purple kind of reddish tint over the darker areas of the footage you can adjust this on any of the other colors if you wanted to as well now it's been closed up the creative tab and it's going to toggle down the curves tab here for the mitri color as I scroll this down a few different options we can adjust the first though is gonna be on the main curve so with the white one selected here what I'm gonna do is make sure gonna pull this down on that top point just a little bit something kind of like that level there and then what I want to do is actually want to just go ahead and come out horizontally with it kind of line it back up with the original curve what we're doing is we're kind of clipping that white level so you can see it just kind of clip some of that detail out of the whites that's pretty common with VHS footage you just typically doesn't have that much dynamic range and this is a nice way we can kind of emulate that yeah just to kind of mess up the footage a little bit more I might come over here to the green Channel I'm just gonna grab the top part of the green I'm just gonna shift it off axis just a little bit there at the top and I'll do the same thing with the blue and I'll just bring it actually down the other way just so they're kind of off and you see it's kind of has a yellow tint to everything and we're gonna close up the curves tab here and we're gonna come out here to the vignette and I typically like to add a negative one for the amount right here you'll see that just kind of darken around the edges there but we're actually gonna kind of crop in on this footage so these darker areas right at the very edge we actually won't even see that so just gonna add kind of a little bit of subtle getting around the actual four-thirds that we end up with in the end if you are gonna be showing your footage in full widescreen you might not down it down all the way to negative one would be like negative 0.5 or something like that let's go ahead and close up the vignette now we're ready to apply the next effect that's gonna be the channel blur effect so we come back over here to effects I'll toggle down blur and sharpen we're gonna select the channel blur effect just add that underneath lumetri color this is probably the most powerful effect for a VHS look in my opinion it's gonna give us some of that color fringing that's really commonly associated with VHS footage but we're gonna use the channel blur effect in kind of a unique way we're actually use two different versions of it and I'll show you why what we're gonna do is we're gonna come over to the red blurriness I'm gonna set the red here somewhere around 20 or so I'm gonna set it to 22 and you can do this with any of the colors that she prefer however I typically recommend just suggesting one or maybe two of the colors you don't want to adjust all three because if you do that she's gonna kind of act like a Gaussian blur it's gonna be blurring on all channels so right now you can see on our footage we're go ahead and make this fullscreen you can see we're getting some red fringing around kind of the edges here and that's what we want how we're getting a limit of unwanted blurring around the edge of our video so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna come in here and check on repeat edge pixels now the way we're gonna differentiate this a little bit is we're gonna come out here to blur dimensions and we're just gonna change this to be just vertical so now if we look at this again in fullscreen we're gonna see we're only giving that red for any kind of on the top half of everything it's not kind of going all the way around like it was before and that's very important because we're going to add another channel blur effect with a different color going in the other axis so let's come back over to our effects and select channel blur again just add another copy of this below the first channel blur we added and just scroll that down so now when I come over to the blue blurriness and I'm gonna make this be 30 and I'm also gonna check on repeat edge pixels and I'm gonna change the blur dimensions for this one to be horizontal and I might even add just a little bit of subtle red blurriness back onto this as well I said it's something like 14 just to give that a little bit extra dimension and let's go ahead and look at this in full screen again now and you can see we get kind of this nice fringing here we have that green and blue on the edges and red on top and this kind of helps emulate an RGB split effect going on with our footage now we can go ahead and add in some of that sharpening I mentioned before so let's come back over here and we're gonna scroll down to unsharp mask let's apply that underneath the second channel blur and we're gonna bring this down what I want to do for a mount I'm gonna set this to be 100 but where we're really gonna get our effect from this is gonna be under radius I'm gonna set this on a fairly high amount something like 12 when I do that you can see how that really fringes and kind of pops around all the edges of everything I can actually scroll and adjust this you can kind of see what's happening to the footage so you can see really you can push this to an extreme I get I'm gonna set this back to 12 it's go ahead and Ike this full screen again and look at this because we initially blurred out our footage we're not getting it over sharpening or or a result that would be not necessarily authentic for VHS we are getting kind of that emulated really fringe look and just really kind of retro look on this footage that's not really like using unsharp mask to create that look finally we want to add a little bit of subtle noise onto this footage let's come back over here to the effects and we're gonna find noise I'm gonna toggle that down and we're just gonna select lis noise effect place that underneath unsharp mask and I'm gonna set the amount of noise to be something fairly low something like 8 percent and I'm actually gonna check off to use color noise and you can see when I make this fullscreen we're just gonna get a little bit of almost like a film greatest effect on top of this really just adding a little extra Distortion let's go ahead and do a quick preview of this I'm gonna set my out point right here and I'm gonna come here to sequence and just like render into out alright so now we can see the results of the VHS look that we created entirely inside of Premiere Pro I'll so if you download the project file for this tutorial I included some VHS assets that I created you can use to accent your VHS look even more if went ahead and import those into Premiere Pro let's go ahead and open that up and what I've got here is this VHS grain I'm just gonna drag and drop this on top of my video and we're gonna trim this so it's only the length of my clip and what this is it's just a little bit more kind of like emulated grain you can see we with some color distortions there's kind of magenta and green kind of color tones subtly on this you can see it kind of flickers and then there's also a little black specks and will appear every once in a while again just kind of accenting that VHS look and so what you can do with this go ahead and place that above your footage and for the blending mode under the effects controls go ahead and set this to be overlay and that'll just overlay that on top of your video and if it's a little too intense you can always adjust the opacity of it bring that down to something like 80 or 50 because on different Clips you will see that color fringing and color kind of variation a little bit more or less and sometimes they can be a little too distracting so just adjust the opacity with that and you can kind of see what this looks like here on our clip now also if you are going to use this VHS grain overlay you might want to go back to your original clip and go ahead and just turn off the noise effect if that's too much noise for you or you can leave it on really it's your preference now again traditionally VHS video is going to be in the 4 by 3 format we have a few different methods we can use to create that first of all with our sequence go in select your sequence come here to sequence at the top and under sequence settings you can change this to be a four by three aspect ratio right now I'm working with 1920 by 1080 so in order to make this four by three I could just changes to be 1440 and what I going to click over here you'll see that I'll change that to be an actual four by three and we come in here and click OK and it's gonna adjust this and click OK you know see it's actually gonna crop in on our footage to make that aspect ratio the traditional VHS aspect ratio now for me personally I like to actually just add an overlay on top of HD footage because it's a really a stylized look and I don't really want to upload a full video in this aspect ratio someone hit ctrl Z to undo that change and what I've included in the assets you'll see I've got these two different 4 by 3 aspect ratio overlays for HD video and one is just a typical one like we just saw but the other one I've got is this vintage one I'm gonna drag and drop that on top of my footage you can see you know just go ahead and make this the same length of the video clip what I like about the vintage one is it crops it to the four by three but if we're going to make this full screen you can see we kind of have these slight rounded corners and it's a little bit of a feathered edge too so just kind of adds that retro vibe onto our clip so if you are going to be adding the VHS effect to an HD video they would like a music video or something like that you can always just use overlays like this to again give it more of that VHS aesthetic also include with the project file though I've went ahead and created a VHS preset and a VHS wiggle effect it'll add kind of a little bit of subtle VHS wiggle to your footage we're go ahead and show you how you can install those and use those really quickly so come up here to the effects panel and other presets I'm just gonna right click on presets and select import presets then just locate the project file folder and you'll see VHS presets inside of there go ahead and select that and click open and now if we come back over to presets and I'll toggle this down you're gonna see we have these VHS effects right here and so we have the first one which is VHS look so I'm just gonna go ahead and delete this clip with a B I've got there I'm gonna drag in another clip I've got and just places down here and you're gonna see what we can do with this so here we have our standard clip we're going to select VHS look drag and drop and now we've immediately applied the same VHS settings onto this clip but if we go ahead and preview this clip you'll see the clip is actually just locked down so now if we want to add that kind of VHS wiggle to this I've got another preset here called VHS shake so I'm gonna select that and apply that to my footage as well and when we do that you'll see two things have happened one the footage got scaled up by 1% that's just to ensure we don't get any black edges when it is shaking around but you'll see we have keyframes here on every frame of this clip and so now if we go ahead and do a quick ramp preview of this and take a look you'll now see we have that subtle wiggle shake added on top of our footage and typically you'd have to actually round trip over to After Effects add a wiggle expression on your footage and then bring it back into Premiere Pro but now with this preset you can actually apply this to any clip up to one minute in length and that'll go ahead and just immediately add that wiggle motion to your footage now most of time each of your clips are gonna be under one minute but if you do have one that is over a minutes and you want to add the shake to it you can still do that just like the razor tool and just go ahead and cut it somewhere before the 1 minute mark and then just apply the VHS shake to each half of that video it'll still look correct and you'll be able to get that shake on the clip it's over 1 minute long finally if you guys want to add a few more VHS effects onto your footage I'm gonna come back over here to video effects and under distort there's two effects in here that you can use to also accident the first one's gonna be offset if I go ahead and apply this to my clip you can see we can use offset to kind of emulate that frame slipping that you commonly see on VHS footage and so you can kind of just roll this and keyframe it do whatever you need to do with that and the next effect we can use is the turbulent displace if I apply this on my clip we can create a little bit of comments like static distortion on our footage on the displacement go ahead and changes to be only horizontal displacement and for the size you're gonna bring us down really low and for the amount you hadn't increase that here quite a bit you also increase the complexity if we want to as well you can see if I go ahead and make this fullscreen you can see we getting some of that kind of like VHS Distortion almost like tracking you're fast-forwarding type look on our footage then all I need to do is keyframe the offset and the evolution of this and you can keep framing on and off on your clips as you wish all right guys hopefully enjoyed this tutorial and picked up some ideas for creating the VHS look on your own footage this is a really fun tutorial to experiment with and create I always enjoy creating the VHS look remember don't forget to download the project file that includes the VHS presets and other goodies also make sure you check out the other tutorials and content on the premium beat blog they post a ton of content on there every week again it's been Charles Yeager for premium beat thanks for watching you

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 659,406

Keywords: vhs look, retro, vintage effect, how to get vhs look, premiere pro, video editing tutorial, how to get retro look, video hacks, premiumbeat, royalty free music, video effects, simple tutorial, filmmaking, adobe, no plugins, free assets

Id: josO1SIKzaw

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 04 2019