In today’s world of crisp, clean, and sometimes boring footage, purposefully destroying and blending your work is gaining popularity. Here’s how to do it.
If you’ve ever stayed up late enough to catch Adult Swim’s Off The Air, you’ve probably seen some really trippy-looking visuals mashed together into a bunch of colors and swirling pixels in a true display of aesthetic madness. You can see this technique, along with many others like it, in all kinds of places. Most recently, it’s become popular in music videos.
In the following video, Robbie from Shutterstock Tutorials walks you through four different ways to cause trippy, souped-up mayhem in your video edits.
1. Datamoshing
Datamoshing is a cool new art form that takes uses digital videos to create original artistic works by combining them together using software. It takes advantage of the way that digital video is encoded to make one video appear to dance across and destroy the other video is a very psychedelic way. Datamoshing is basically a technique of damaging video clips to create a glitch effect wherein frames that should change don’t. It’s most noticeable between cuts and across motion. According to datamoshing.com (which is a great resource on the technique), “datamoshing is the process of corrupting, removing or replacing I-frames, causing.
Datamoshing is a technique that has been gaining popularity over the last few years. It started with old editing software that was a bit buggy, sometimes causing “I-Frames” and “Delta-Frames” to not play nicely the way they’re supposed to. (Don’t know what those are? Neither do I.) However, some people leaned into this glitch and created a pretty viral trend.
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While there are some pretty cool underground (and more purist) ways to create the datamoshing effect, there is now a very convenient plugin that you can use with After Effects to accomplish the same thing. In the video, Robbie uses the Datamosh plugin to get his effects quickly and easily. Using the plugin, you can customize the Delta frames and I-frames. According to Robbie, altering the Delta Frames creates that blooming and stretching pixel effect. The I-frames track one pixel from one frame to another. So, altering this will keep certain pixels exactly where they are, causing one image to bleed into another.
Beyond datamoshing, there are other interesting ways to create interesting looks and transitions using your video editor of choice.
2. Displacement Wipe
This method is mostly for creating an interesting transition. It uses some pretty specific displacement of the image to achieve the effect.
This is a method developed by yours truly — while staring at After Effects and playing around with different effects in the distort category and the like, trying to come up with my own datamosh-style effect using native After Effects plugins.
The best one I came up with is this one, using the Displacement Map effect. You apply the effect to the first clip in the transition. First, set the displacement map to the second clip in the transition. Using the effect, you turn off the horizontal displacement altogether by switching the dropdown to “Off.” Then, for the vertical displacement map, you change the dropdown to “luminance.”
Now, using the vertical displacement options, start the stopwatch, and raise the vertical displacement significantly over time. This causes one image to melt into the other based on the second clip’s luminance values.
3. Double Exposure
A common effect that you often see in photography is a double exposure effect. This means you see two different exposures, usually taken to merge them together interestingly.
This effect is also possible with video. You get the most interesting and effective results when you record footage of your subject against a stark, white background. Then, using blend modes, you can layer the two pieces of footage on top of each other. To get the most popular look when using this effect, you can use the “Add” or “Screen” blending modes. Sometimes you can get interesting results using “Hard Light” or “Overlay” as well.
You can create this effect using any editing software that includes blending modes and very basic compositing options.
4. Key Transition
Another interesting transition effect involves using color keying to your advantage.
This is something that you can do basically anytime you have something with a strong, solid color in your shot. A mailbox, a sign, a car — anything with a bright and saturated solid color that you can use with a keying effect.
In this example, Robbie uses a landmark sign that was a bright green color to key. In Premiere, you can use the Ultra Key effect and simply select the necessary color with the medicine dropper for the “key color” parameter. You may want to customize the screen matte options or the contrast/color of your scene to get the desired effect. However, this is a great way to make your scene feel like it flows from one world to another. Pair it with a gimbal, and you can flow from one environment into another seamlessly.
Looking for more tutorials on video production? Check these out.
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Datamoshing videos can be a time-consuming process, automation can help. For Windows users AutoHotkey is free, open-source macro-creation and automation software that can handle some of the repetitive tasks involved in datamoshing.
The following script for AutoHotkey automates I-frame removal in Avidemux, normally a manual process described in this tutorial. The video above was datamoshed using this automation script.
Load AutoHotkey with the script below and then when it comes time to remove I-frames in Avidemux simply focus the slider below the video and press Control+F to trigger the AutoHotkey script. The script will send the appropriate key strokes to remove the next 10 I-frames while you pop out for a break.
These types of scripts could also be used to automate key strokes while hex editing images, consider a script which would move a certain number of characters across and then insert a character — that could glitch out an image quite nicely. Similarly one could experiment with automating photo editing processes by scripting with a program like AutoHotkey.
Some of these types of automation could be accomplished through the usage of a programming framework, or scripting language, but automating at the user interface level can remove a lot of overhead and restrictions.
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