VHS look

[Nicolas Hanson]

One of the commercials I will be working on next week has a scene with some kids looking at family video on their parents old VHS tapes. Any advice on how to transform modern RED footage to look like old VHS video? What characterizes old VHS video? Any colors that were more dominant than others etc?

[Frank Wylie]

I'd slightly over saturate just the red channel to give it that warm, fuzzy feel and apply an overall vertical and horizontal blur of a few pixels to start with.  You might even try splitting out the RGB channels and changing the apparent convergence of the matrix, but I'd be careful with that one and use a light touch. 

There are a number of packages out there that will give you tape creases, sync lock failures, head failure and noise.

I doubt if you'd want to go as crazy as the following video, and it is black and white, but it's fun to watch Colorist Raymond Gangstad and Director Stian Andersen go ape with this sort of effect...

 

[Tom Evans]

Have you thought about running your footage through a VHS player? This plugin could also be useful http://www.redgiant.com/universe-tools/vhs/ 

[Nicolas Hanson]

Thank you very much guys!

[Stig Olsen]

On 12/15/2016 at 11:59 PM, Tom Evans said:

Have you thought about running your footage through a VHS player? 

We did something similar some years ago on this spot. Remember we had to run it through the VHS machine several times to get the desired look we were after. Desaturated a little, added a green tint and cropped to 4:3.

 

[Yoav Raz]

Run it through a VHS machine is the best way. Desaturated and add some sut back into red channel,

I also run this vhs tape and  while capturing it i played with the cables to get some analog drops.

and also run black tape and captured the signal and key it over some shots to get this broken signal.

cropped to 4:3.

[Nicolas Hanson]

That's some really great tips Yoav, thank you!

[Mark Mulcaster]

I worked on a TV show last year where they wanted to insert alternate story lines into older music videos.

One was Cry Me a River and the other was the Band Aid Do they knows it Christmas. 

Cry Me a river was an interesting challenge as they could only get a youtube quality version but after some trial and error and using some resizing passes plus heavy compression i was able  compress the new Alexa pictures to fit in with the original, what sold the video was the online editor created a youtube style frame to help explain the poor video quailty

The second video was more interesting, because they were trying to get the look and feel of the video the production company opted to hire an old 1980s JVC camera! It worked a treat and probably looked worse than the orginal footage.

Hiring an old school camera was a novelty and i think was done more for the directors amusement but to help the two sources sit better together i found an old FX elements tape in my locker and comped some extra shash and break-up across the video. I think its harder to reproduce the more analogue errors of yestayear without a decent plug in, soon top of the that i also added a slight chroma aboration that came and went and i think it sold the whole thing pretty well.