WEBVTT
Kind: captions
Language: en

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The VHS look has been popular lately

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in music videos and other video art,
as the 90s come back into fashion:

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all neon colours and diagonal lines

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and over-enthusiastic voices!

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I cannot keep that up.

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Now, some producers will
actually take the time

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to get their nice, crisp HD footage
and put it through

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an actual video recorder
to get that effect,

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but let's be honest, most won't.

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Most will use the same filter
as everyone else, so I figured

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to explain how it works

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I would talk to the guy
who wrote that filter.

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- VHS has very muted colour
because more information

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is dedicated to the
black-and-white information

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or the luminance part of the image.

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The colour suffers a little bit,
so it gets downsampled,

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there's less information there,

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it tends to kinda get softened
and bleed outside of the edges and stuff.

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When we originally gathered
footage, so,

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they went out to Goodwill and
second-hand stores and picked up

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as many VHS and SVHS decks
that they could find.

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With the decks and camcorders that we had,

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we used a clean reference image
that we could later

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compare the recorded
version on the deck to.

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So, when you take an original, clean
version and the post-VHS version

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and line them on top of each other,

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you can create what we
call a lookup table,

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which allows us to define the colour
differences between the two images.

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But a lot of the time,
people are quite young,

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applying these retro filters or styles,

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and have sort of an idea of what they're
supposed to look like,

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so it's a little bit of both.

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- VHS is an analog format,
it's not storing ones and zeros,

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it's storing patterns on a magnetic tape,

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and that means that
copies aren't bit-perfect.

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Not only is there random noise,

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but there's also some
interesting analog glitches.

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- We start with a blank tape,
it looks like this.

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When you throw it in to
one of the VCR decks,

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one of them has
the lid off of it,

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and that is the one that actually
died making the VHS transitions.

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That one went through a lot

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and all of that got
printed onto this tape.

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Essentially just taking the device
and then doing a lot of bad things to it.

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While the tape is loaded in
through the playback heads,

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you can run a magnet across them

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and just really mess up how
it's going to play that back,

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and tracking be damned:
it'll flutter and be all over the place.

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This one, I believe, died
based on a belt failure,

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but that belt failed while I
was using two pencil erasers

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that were taped to my fingers
slowing down the head

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while dropping a magnet on
top of it.

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It was interesting,

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and then all of a sudden it
just mechanically stopped.

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The hardest part about that
was just getting the tape out.

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- There is a section in the code

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that is just called 'tape damage'.

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There are things like what
we call the pop lines,

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when you are recording tape
and you get pieces of dust

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or debris or whatever stuck to the tape

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and it rolls across the scan head,

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that one line will create
a streak across the screen,

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and then there's also a scrolling wrinkle.

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Generally it's repeating
cause often that happens when

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the tape jams up or something like that,

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and you end up with a bunch of wrinkles

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that somebody then
reassembled the tape back.

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- Of course, there are some things
that a filter can't add, like:

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Camera angles! Neon typography!
And fake enthusiasm!

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But perhaps some things are
better left in the past.

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- "And there's more from Tom
at the same time next week.

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"Coming up later, Captain Disillusion
is going around in circles,

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"but next, a programme chosen for you
by the Algorithm."