waveform-smear
An image unable to stay still — bright structure leaking sideways into luminous electronic waveform residue. Directional electronic decomposition, not motion blur.
What it’s for
waveform-smear is what a picture looks like when the
display can no longer contain it: every bright contour, edge,
glyph or shape stretches sideways into flowing signal, like an
oscilloscope that never settles or a CRT bleeding its own image
into bandwidth. It is the sibling of data-storm
— same overlay-bake architecture — but where that
effect is computational overload, this one is pure signal
smearing: the image transforming into electronic residue.
Reach for it when the shot needs to feel hypnotic and spectral
rather than violent — a silhouette dissolving into
luminous data, a logo or title decomposing into scanline drift,
a face becoming a waveform. It operates on luminance and edges,
never semantic content, so it works on any source: video,
drawings, text, particles, arbitrary content. The master
strength dials it from “faint signal
ghosting” to “the frame is gone into bandwidth”.
What it does to a frame
- Contour extraction — a Sobel pass on source luminance pulls bright edges and high-contrast boundaries; dark regions stay deep black so most of the frame remains unlit.
- Recursive echoes — each contour duplicated rightward with uneven spacing, phase-shifted warp and geometric dimming — unstable contour anatomy that stays dense near the source.
- Horizontal signal smear — long luminous trails carrying partial structure, strongest on bright regions, oscilloscope-persistence rather than optical blur.
- Distance dissolution — the farther a trail travels the less coherent it gets: solid streak → dashed → noisy → sparse electronic residue.
- Scan turbulence — per-row horizontal drift and scanline rhythm; the signal wobbles and flows continuously.
- Phosphor glow — cyan/white bloom on bright contours with an analog luminance bleed.
- Signal persistence — slow recursive temporal feedback that intensifies on bright motion, leaving spectral afterimages.
Where it lives in the app
Effects tray, group Glitch & analog noise. Add it to any layer. It reads strongest on high-contrast content — text, contours, silhouettes — because the smear needs bright structure to dissolve. Gate it with a mask layer so only the diegetic screen or a logo decomposes while the rest of the frame stays intact.
Parameters
| Key | Range | Default | Effect |
|---|---|---|---|
strength | 0–1 | 0.7 | Master gate — overall amount of signal decomposition |
smearLength | 0–1 | 0.65 | How far the horizontal trail travels before decaying |
dissolution | 0–1 | 0.55 | Trail decay rate — how soon it breaks into residue |
smearStrength | 0–1 | 0.7 | Opacity/brightness of the horizontal smear trail |
recursion | 0–6 | 3 | Number of recursive rightward contour echoes |
echoSpacing | 0–1 | 0.4 | Horizontal step between successive echoes |
echoFalloff | 0–1 | 0.6 | Geometric per-echo alpha decay |
edgeThreshold | 0–1 | 0.35 | Contour sensitivity — higher smears more structure |
turbulence | 0–1 | 0.5 | Per-row horizontal drift of the baked signal layer |
glow | 0–1 | 0.6 | Phosphor bloom on bright cells toward the tint |
scanline | 0–1 | 0.45 | Alternate-row dimming for CRT scanline rhythm |
persistence | 0–1 | 0.5 | Slow temporal feedback (drives frame-history depth) |
flicker | 0–30 Hz | 10 | Instability re-roll rate for trail fragmentation |
tintR/G/B | 0–255 | 60 / 235 / 255 | Signal tint (single Signal tint picker) |
Pairs well with
- data-storm — computational overload under signal smear; the throughput and the transmission failing together.
- phosphor — deepens the persistence into a screen that has been dissolving for hours.
- palette quantize (Cyan) — locks the signal tint so the smear stops looking like an effect and becomes one specific dying display.
- mask layers — dissolve only the in-frame monitor, logo or lower third while the rest stays intact.