I've been wanting to be able to better mix digital work with analog work. Often times, it feels off if the digital work comes in after the analog work in the process because analog just has that feeling. You know what I'm talking about. Glow, weird contrast and saturation variation, sharpness discrepancies, noise, etc. I can often come close digitally, but I wanted a way to truly emulate the process of analog video glitching entirely in After Effects. So here we go! FYI, this process does require a paid plugin for After Effects called Signal. It's $39 and has definitely been worth it for me. The algorithm it uses for emulating degraded analog signals is really effective. You can find the plugin here: https://aescripts.com/signal/
First and foremost, here's what we are going to make:
Source Footage
For our source footage on this walkthrough, we're going to use this clip from Pexels by Magda Ehlers: https://www.pexels.com/video/a-scorpion-fish-in-an-aquarium-2561846/
I loaded the video into After Effects and chose a short section that I liked. I created a work area for that section of the video. The first thing we need to do is remove our fish from the background. For this, I used the Rotobrush built into After Effects. If you don't know how to do this, there are a thousand tutorials on how it works. It's really easy and we won't be covering it in this walkthrough. So here's our fish with the background removed:
Now we need more contrast. So, I create a new Adjustment Layer above our clip and add a Curves adjustment to it with the following settings:
Now, I want to emulate analog color synthesis that I sometimes do with my Waaave Pool device in my actual analog workflow. So, in that same adjustment layer, I add a CC Toner adjustment. I set it to Pentone and set the colors that I want for the different tone levels. You can really play around with the colors on this. You can also keyframe and animate the colors for CC Toner which is a ton of fun. Here's the settings I used for this:
Now, it's time to emulate the video feedback effect that is so much fun to do in an analog set up. For this, I created a new adjustment layer on top of the previous one. I now renamed my adjustment layers to "color" and the new one to "feedback" so I don't get confused later. In the "feedback" adjustment layer, I add an Echo effect and a Gaussian Blur effect using the following settings:
The blur is just there to dampen the sharpness of some of the echo outlines. You can play with the echo settings a lot. Just make sure to keep your echo time negative and your operator set to "Composite in Front".
Here's what it looks like now:
Next, I will create a new adjustment layer above all the others and call it "vhs effect". I will first add a Glow effect to this layer to just give a bit more glow and pixel blending to our render. Here are the Glow settings I used:
I then add the Signal effect to this adjustment layer. The possibilities with this plugin are kinda endless and you can spend days tweaking settings and messing with keyframing. I'm keeping this super simple and am barely going to deviate from default settings. Here are the settings I used:
I ended up keyframing the random seed from 1 and ending at the end of the clip at 4001. I also keyframed the Frequency setting under Luma Modulation starting with .601 and going up to about 1.8 at the 2/3 point of the clip and then immediately coming back down to .601.
Here's how it is looking:
Nice! At this point, you can decide what you want the background to be. This actually looks pretty cool on a solid black, but I wanted to put it over some static snow instead. So, I selected all my layers, right-clicked and chose "Pre-Compose". Now in my pre-composition, I create a new black solid and a new white solid on top of that. The fish goes above the white solid and I give the white solid a blend mode of "Dancing Dissolve":
Next, I change the white solid's opacity to 40%.
We could just leave it at that and it would be cool, but I'd rather make the static look more legit. So I created a new adjustment layer above the white solid, but below the fish. I added a new Signal effect to the adjustment layer with the following settings:
Awesome! Now it's a matter of composition. I edit the comp settings to make the width of the video 1440px and position the fish better in the frame:
Awesome. This is definitely a workflow I can use to mix digital and analog work more seamlessly! I hope you had fun working on this and let me know if you have any questions!
