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Ntsc-rs – open-source video emulation of analog TV and VHS artifacts

242 pointsby gregsadetskyyesterday at 7:17 PM58 commentsview on HN

Comments

npuntyesterday at 10:31 PM

Time to wheel out one of my favorite quotes about the signature of a medium:

"Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit - all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it. The excitement of grainy film, of bleached-out black and white, is the excitement of witnessing events too momentous for the medium assigned to record them." - Brian Eno

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atum47today at 12:21 AM

That's nice. I've always been a fan of this effect. I myself was working on something (way simpler) in the past. I was just getting a pixel splitting into three separate values (r,g,b) and plotting them side by side to emulate LED behavior. I end up creating an image that you can use on your website to give the impression of lines - https://github.com/victorqribeiro/oldTerminal (that was the best I was able to do without using canvas, for the web).

Some day I might try it again using modern css

BigTTYGothGFyesterday at 8:21 PM

Idle thought: I don't think I've ever seen one of these TV emulator things implement the situation where the vertical oscillator was slightly wrong and you get the picture slowly looping up the screen.

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JdeBPyesterday at 7:47 PM

You're not getting the full experience of analogue telly artifacts until you emulate colour subcarrier phase shift and colour burst detection failure. (-:

And of course PAL and Hanover bars.

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MycroftJonesyesterday at 11:42 PM

Fantastic! Is there something like this also for the scratch and hiss of old LP vinyl records? And the various types of squeals, crackles and fuzz of old ham radio setups? Never found anything that can really simulate those well.

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zellynyesterday at 7:53 PM

I once tried to fully analyze the amazing NTSC emulation used in OpenEmulator. I went down a rabbit hole that involved losing motivation several lessons in to a signal processing class on YouTube, but for those interested, I did at least pull quite a lot of it apart here: https://observablehq.com/@zellyn/apple-ii-ntsc-emulation-ope...

I also ported it to JavaScript (linked from above page)

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liampullesyesterday at 11:58 PM

I'll wait until they do some PAL emulation: take an NTSC source, blurrily upscale it to 576p, apply a crap deinterlacing algorithm to produce a technically progressive image, and some frame blending to get it to 25 fps. Shitorific.

peacedroneyesterday at 11:28 PM

Just installed the OpenFX plugin and tested in DaVinci. It runs snappy and looks awesome with tons of control. It can go from subtle to soup. It really starts getting interesting when you automate the params. Appreciate that this is rooted in actual emulation. I'll definitely use this in my edits. Good find!

fs90today at 12:27 AM

That's interesting!

devindotcomyesterday at 7:46 PM

I do love that this is an area of such active development. But I'm curious to see what the artifact simulation crowd thinks of it. I most often encounter them as shaders for emulators and such, but of course this kind of structure degradation of a pristine video is also in high demand these days for video production. Producers want that 90s-camcorder look but crews can't actually use the clunky 90s-camcorder hardware and formats.

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RgrTheShrubbryesterday at 11:59 PM

Are there audio emulators out there that simulate VHS compressed warped audio?

sillywalkyesterday at 9:36 PM

I was immediately reminded of the fake VHS line artifacts for Stranger Things - A Bad Lip Reading[0], which I assume are sort of a bit about the fake film grain things during the opening titles in the Stranger Things show.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-4rhjO6xYg

modinfoyesterday at 9:26 PM

To have true VHS effect, I think we should train AI for this, examples from digital videos to record on true VHS tape, on multiples VHS devices then digitalize and calculate difference between original and digitalized from VHS.

Then even we could have filter like: VHS Panasonic, VHS Sony...

This would be very interesting project.

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rpastuszakyesterday at 8:08 PM

Greg! I love this!!! Just last night I was trying to rewatch the x-files and was telling Luna that I would need to get a TV filter/shader/overlay thingy to see it the way it was meant to be seen.

You mind reader you

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agentifyshyesterday at 8:10 PM

heres a test output it looks convincing

https://x.com/AgentifySH/status/2063351105162224119

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joshuamcginnisyesterday at 9:20 PM

I wonder if any of this was used to produce Backrooms

therepanicyesterday at 8:08 PM

It looks quite unusual, I will definitely try it.

nekiwoyesterday at 7:47 PM

never expected valadaptive to be on front page of HN

natasyesterday at 7:42 PM

pretty cool!

fnord77yesterday at 8:57 PM

Great, now I won't be able to trust that old videos aren't AI slop either.

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