Glitch & analog noise

What this group is for

This group is degradation as authorship. Every effect here imitates a specific failure — magnetic tape, lossy codecs, tired sensors, broken silicon — so the emotional register is unease, decay, and the strange authority of an image that looks like evidence rather than design. It makes the audience trust the footage precisely because it looks damaged.

Projects that reach for it: a horror cold open posing as recovered tape, a cyberpunk HUD that stutters under load, a documentary recreation of an old broadcast, a music video that wants the picture itself to feel like it’s decomposing in time with the track.

The effects

• blocks — Horizontal VHS-tracking block shifts that tug bands of the image sideways. Good for the moment a found tape first refuses to lock.
• line-tear — A hard split with two different shifts across a tear line, like a signal cut clean in half. Good for a single violent glitch on an edit point.
• datamosh-lite — Digital corruption where random blocks freeze to an older frame, with block size setting the corruption granularity. Good for a memory smearing into the present.
• frame-stutter — The VHS pause: randomly holds cells from the previous frame so motion judders and catches. Good for a paused-tape interrogation beat.
• projector-gate — Film-projector artefacts — brightness flicker plus drifting dust particles — with no frame history needed. Good for a faux-archival 16mm reel or a séance flashback.
• noise — Random character and colour replacement scattered across the frame. Good for raw signal hash or a dead channel between stations.
• film-grain — Organic photographic silver-halide grain — a per-frame independent, multi-octave noise field that bites in shadows and midtones, stays gentle in highlights, and evolves without scrolling. A clean digital image printed through living photographic emulsion, never digital static.
• rgb-shift — Chromatic aberration that throws red left and blue right. Good for cheap-lens unease or a CRT pushed too hard.
• jitter — Continuous sub-cell wobble applied by row, by column, or per cell. Good for a nervous, never-quite-still surveillance feed.
• macroblock-collapse — Codec collapse: the frame breaks into a block grid where blocks hold prior state, drift motion-vector style, or burst back while chroma degrades. Good for a stream buffering itself into abstraction.
• mosquito-noise — Edge-aware digital chatter — noisy character and colour jitter only near high-contrast edges, like footage re-encoded one too many times. Good for compression that betrays a re-uploaded clip.
• chroma-420-bleed — Chroma subsampling where luma stays sharp but colour smears into coarse blocks and bands, the signature of heavy 4:2:0 compression. Good for low-bitrate web video nostalgia.
• dead-pixel-cluster — Stable broken clusters: seeded dead and stuck pixel groups that persist across frames. Good for a damaged display the camera keeps pointing at.
• white-balance-drift — Slow auto white-balance drift — a low-frequency temperature and magenta wander with the occasional snap-back. Good for a long handheld take where the room slowly turns the wrong colour.
• exposure-hunt — An auto-exposure feedback loop where brightness and contrast overshoot then settle toward a target, like a camera hunting for balance. Good for stepping from dark to light and watching the lens panic.
• rolling-shutter-jello — A sensor rolling-shutter artefact: rows read at different times so fast motion shears the image into jello. Good for a whip-pan or a hard camera shake going wrong.
• temporal-contour — An edge detector with memory — Sobel edges plus the decaying edges of prior frames — so moving contours leave ghost outlines. Good for a dream or a presence that the picture half-remembers.
• signal-collapse — Every failure at once: drifting interference bands, desynced RGB, dropped scanlines, VHS warp and roll, macroblock corruption and corrupted frame feedback under one master strength. Good for a transmission dying on the air or footage from hardware that should have been scrapped. Deep dive →

How to reach for it

Find these in the effects tray under the Glitch & analog noise group. Any of them can be gated by a mask layer so the damage only lands where it earns its keep — corrupt just the screen-within-the-shot, tear only the lower third, leave the face clean while the world around it falls apart.