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CRT Video Effect

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Settings are written to the URL as you change them. Nothing differs from the defaults yet.

Turn ordinary footage into a picture on a curved tube screen. Every setting works per frame, so the effect holds steady through camera moves and cuts, while the static changes on every frame.

Tube geometry

Barrel Curvature bends the picture outward from the center, the way the convex glass of a CRT bowed the image. The corners fall outside the source frame and turn black. Vignette darkens toward the edges on top of that, falling off more steeply close to the rim.

Scanlines and the phosphor mask

Scanlines darken two rows out of every three, by up to 60%. The phosphor mask splits each group of three columns into a red, a green, and a blue stripe. Both patterns are three pixels wide in the exported frame, so the output size changes how they read.

Play the result at its own size where possible. A player that scales a three-pixel pattern by an uneven factor turns it into moiré bands that were not in the file.

Color bleed, static, and glow

Color Bleed shifts red one way and blue the other, by up to 1.5% of the frame width, which gives edges the fringing of a misconverged tube. Static Noise adds grain to every pixel. Phosphor Glow blurs a copy of the frame and screen-blends it back, so bright areas spill light into their surroundings.

Export time

The CRT step costs roughly 100 ms per 720p frame on one core. The export spreads frames across the processor’s cores; a dual-core laptop renders about 10 frames per second at 720p, a third of real time for a 30 fps clip. Choose 1080p for finer lines and expect about twice the export time.

Frequently Asked Questions

The frame is bent outward like curved glass, red and blue are pulled apart from green, two of every three rows are darkened, a red, green, and blue column mask is laid over the picture, the edges are shaded, and a blurred copy is screen-blended back on top as glow.

Barrel curvature samples each pixel from further out toward the edges. Near the corners that position falls outside the source frame, and those pixels are drawn black, like the bezel of a tube set. Lower Barrel Curvature to shrink them.

No. The noise is seeded from each frame's timestamp, so it changes 30 times a second and the same frame always gets the same noise. That is also why the preview and the export match.

Scanlines and the phosphor mask are drawn in output pixels: every third row and every third column. A 1080p export packs 1.5 times as many of them into the same picture as 720p, so the pattern reads finer.

It is copied into the export unchanged when the container can hold its codec, and re-encoded when it cannot. A note under the export button says which happened.

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