Video effects
Every colour, blur, texture and transform effect in the app, and which of them keyframe.
How to make a VHS look on your phone
Clip Smasher's tape effect has one amount slider and twelve dials behind it. This is what each one does, how to set them in the right order, and three recipes to start from.
Why most VHS filters do not convince
A tape that is damaged evenly, every frame, from beginning to end, does not look like tape. It looks like a filter, because that is what it is.
Real tape is intermittent. It plays fine, the tracking slips for a fifth of a second, it plays fine again, the colour drops out while the picture wobbles. The unevenness is the whole effect, and it is why the single most common mistake is turning the faults up.
Clip Smasher's tape is built in two halves, and knowing which half a dial belongs to is most of what makes it tuneable.
- The base is on every frame: the bandwidth the format actually kept, colour bleeding sideways, the ringing after a hard edge, scan lines, and the torn band along the very bottom where the video head switched over. This is what makes the picture look like tape at all.
- The faults are scheduled ahead of time and arrive in bursts: dropout, colour fringing, snow, head noise, edge wave, jitter, drift, the roll and tracking bands. These are what make it look like a tape in trouble.
The main VHS amount controls how often the faults happen. At the bottom of its range the picture is essentially clean and you are seeing only the base; at its default it is clean for roughly half the time; and even at the top it is never permanently broken, because a picture that never recovers stops reading as a tape and starts reading as a mistake.
Step by step
Add the effect
Select the clip, open EFFECTS and add VHS. Leave the amount where it lands for now.
Watch several seconds before judging it
This is the step people skip. The faults are intermittent, so a two-second glance may catch a clean stretch or may land on a tracking tear. Play a real run.
Open the Tape group
Tap Tape under the VHS row to reveal the twelve dials. Each sits at 1, which is neutral: 0 turns that fault off entirely, 2 doubles it. There is a reset next to the toggle for when a session gets away from you.
Set the base first
Bandwidth, Colour bleed, Ringing and Scan lines decide what kind of tape this is before any fault happens. Bandwidth is the one doing the heavy lifting: turning it down softens the picture sideways while leaving it sharp vertically, which is the single most recognisable thing about the format.
Then tune the faults, one at a time
Dropout, Tracking, Snow, Head switch, Colour fringing, Wobble, Roll and Tape noise. Change one, watch a full run, then change the next. Changing four at once tells you nothing about which one you liked.
Keyframe a dial if the tape should decay
Hold the clip, release without moving it and choose Automation. Keyframing Tracking from 0 to 2 across a shot is a tape getting worse while you watch, which no single setting can give you.
What each dial does
Twelve dials, each a multiplier on what the wear already gives you.
| Dial | Half | What it does |
|---|---|---|
| Bandwidth | base | How much horizontal detail the format kept. Turn it down and the picture goes soft sideways while staying sharp vertically, which is the single thing that most says tape. |
| Colour bleed | base | Colour smearing sideways out of the edges it belongs to, and lagging behind the brightness it should sit on. |
| Ringing | base | The bright echo just after a hard edge, left by the recorder's own sharpening. |
| Tape noise | fault | Speckle that swells and fades rather than sitting evenly on every frame. It is drawn inside the reduced bandwidth, so it is chunky the way tape noise actually is. |
| Scan lines | base | The horizontal line structure of the display. These belong to the screen, so they stay put when the picture rolls. |
| Head switch | base | The torn band along the very bottom of the frame where the video head changed over. |
| Dropout | fault | Brief flashes where the tape lost contact and the picture had nothing to show. |
| Colour fringing | fault | Red and blue pulling apart from each other at the edges of the frame. |
| Snow | fault | Bursts of static across the picture. |
| Wobble | fault | The picture breathing sideways, as though the tape is not quite running at a steady speed. |
| Tracking | fault | Bands of misaligned picture drifting through the frame, the fault you used to fix with the tracking dial. |
| Roll | fault | Vertical hold lost: the whole image travels up or down the screen and wraps, then snaps back when the hold catches. |
Three recipes
Starting points, not settings to copy exactly. The right numbers depend on the shot. Every value is a multiplier where 1 is neutral.
1. Worn tape
A home video that has been watched a lot but works. This is the one you want most of the time, and it is subtler than people expect.
- Main amount low, so the faults are rare and the base does the work.
- Bandwidth around 1.2 and Colour bleed around 1.2: soft sideways, colour not quite where it should be.
- Scan lines and Ringing at 1.
- Tracking, Dropout, Snow and Roll down near 0.3, so something goes wrong occasionally rather than constantly.
2. Bad copy
A tape of a tape. Generation loss, colour that has given up, and faults you notice.
- Main amount around the default.
- Bandwidth up towards 1.8 and Colour bleed up towards 1.8, so detail and colour are both visibly gone.
- Tape noise around 1.5, Ringing around 1.4.
- Tracking around 1.5 and Head switch at 1, so the bottom of the frame is never quite right.
- Roll at 0: a bad copy usually still holds vertically.
3. Dying tape
The machine is losing it. Use this on a short shot or as a keyframed ending, not for a whole video.
- Main amount at the top of its range.
- Tracking 2, Dropout 2, Snow 1.8, Roll 1.5.
- Wobble around 1.6 so the picture is never quite steady between faults.
- Best used keyframed: start every fault dial near 0 and ramp them up across the shot, so the tape fails rather than having already failed.
Two things that make any of these better
- Reach for a boxier frame. A tape look on a wide modern frame reads as a filter on modern footage. Clip Smasher offers landscape, portrait and square project shapes; square is the closest of the three to the era, and “make it square” sets it in one instruction.
- Cut on the faults. A tracking tear on a cut reads as the tape being wound; a tear in the middle of a held shot reads as damage. Both are useful, for different things.
Asking for it in words
The tape is reachable from a typed or dictated instruction too, including the individual dials. A dial asked for on a clip that has no tape yet brings the tape with it, so you never end up with a slider wired to nothing.
- give it a VHS effect
- make it look like an old tape
- add a vhs look
- give it bad tracking
- no scan lines
- make it look vintage
VHS questions
Why does my VHS effect look like a filter rather than tape?
Because damage applied evenly to every frame reads as a filter. Real tape plays fine, slips for a fifth of a second, then plays fine again. The unevenness is the effect. If yours looks flat, the faults are turned up too far and the picture is permanently damaged rather than intermittently damaged. Bring Tracking, Dropout, Snow and Tape noise back towards 1 and lower the main amount instead.
What does the main VHS amount slider actually change?
How often faults happen. At the bottom of its range the picture is essentially clean, showing only the base wear the format always had. At the default it is clean for roughly half of its running time. Even at the top it is never fully damaged, because a picture that is always broken stops reading as tape.
Do the tape dials keyframe?
Yes, each one separately. That is what lets a tracking fault get steadily worse across a shot, or a picture start clean and degrade as a scene goes on.
Will the VHS effect render the same way every time?
Yes. The schedule of faults is derived from the clip itself rather than randomised at render time, so the same clip renders the same tape every time and the fault you saw in the monitor is the one that ends up in the export.
Does the VHS effect look the same at 1080p and 4K?
Yes. The tape is applied to the finished frame rather than to the source, so its features are a proportion of the picture rather than a fixed number of pixels. A tracking band is the same fraction of the screen on any project.
Read next
Datamosh transitions
How the Glitch transition smears one shot into the next, and why it is not a filter laid over the top.
Cut the silence out of a talking video
Tighten a piece to camera in one instruction, then clean up the cuts by hand.
Put a tape look on your own footage
Clip Smasher is free to download for iPhone and Android, and the VHS effect and all twelve dials are in the free version.
Free to download · iPhone and Android · No account · Works offline