signal-collapse
A monitor trying to display reality while its signal chain is actively dying. Not clean synthwave glitch — violent, hostile electronics that never finish stabilising.
What it’s for
signal-collapse is every failure in the chain at
once. Corrupted CRT broadcast, broken GPU memory, VHS tracking
that won’t lock, a digital decoder losing sync —
analog and computational artefacts merging into one picture
that’s fighting to hold itself together and losing. The
image constantly tries to stabilise and never does: bands
drift, channels desync, brightness pulses, dark regions swallow
information whole.
Reach for it when the footage has to feel hostile rather than
stylish — a horror cold open posing as the last frames on
a recovered tape, a transmission cut on the air, surveillance
footage from hardware that should have been replaced years ago,
a climax where the picture itself comes apart in time with the
sound. One effect carries the whole register; the master
strength dials it from “bad reception”
to “the signal is gone”.
What it does to a frame
- Signal band slicing — the frame splits into many horizontal bands that drift, jitter and snap sideways independently; nothing stays put.
- RGB channel desync — red, green and blue pull apart per band with subpixel vibration and occasional violent snaps — cyan/magenta fringing on every edge.
- Scanline system — dense phosphor row structure with whole scanlines dropping out as the signal is lost.
- VHS tracking failure — magnetic warp plus a bright tear bar that rolls vertically through the picture, dragging the image as it passes.
- Digital corruption — macroblocks freeze to an older frame, collapse to black, or fill with synthetic decode noise.
- Corrupted feedback — previous frames bleed back as decaying ghosts that occasionally explode into bright streaks.
- Luma crush & clip — blacks crush deep, whites clip and bloom into RGB fringe; the image reads as electrically overloaded.
- RF noise — per-frame static that thickens in the shadows, with rare full-cell dropouts.
Where it lives in the app
Effects tray, group Glitch & analog noise. Add it to any layer. It reads strongest on moving content because the temporal feedback needs something to chase. Gate it with a mask layer to corrupt just the screen-within-the-shot or the lower third while a face stays clean — collapse that earns its keep instead of wallpaper.
Parameters
| Key | Range | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
strength | 0–1 | 0.9 | Master gate — overall severity of the collapse |
bandCount | 4–64 | 22 | How many horizontal interference bands the frame is sliced into |
bandDrift | 0–1 | 0.7 | How far bands slide, jitter and snap sideways |
rgbDesync | 0–1 | 0.8 | R/G/B channel separation magnitude |
scanlines | 0–1 | 0.7 | Scanline density and dropped-line rate |
vhsWarp | 0–1 | 0.65 | Analog warp strength and rolling-bar drag |
corruption | 0–1 | 0.7 | Macroblock freeze / black / decode-noise amount |
feedback | 0–1 | 0.55 | Temporal ghost persistence (drives frame-history depth) |
noise | 0–1 | 0.6 | RF static density and dropout rate |
lumaCrush | 0–1 | 0.7 | Black-crush and white-clip hardness |
Pairs well with
- phosphor — the afterglow turns the corrupted feedback into a screen that’s been dying for hours, not seconds.
- palette quantize (Green / Amber) — lock the colour and the collapse stops looking like an effect and starts looking like specific broken hardware.
- text-glitch — titles that fail in the same chain as the picture behind them.
- mask layers — corrupt only the diegetic monitor in frame while the room around it stays intact.