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

258 pointsposted 6 hours ago
by gregsadetsky
(ntsc.rs)

59 Comments

npunt

3 hours ago

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

Kaliboy

3 hours ago

I never heard of this quote, but "heard" something similar a while ago, must have been 2020.

I was watching a live worship session on Youtube and it was beautiful, kept my mind at peace.

Now mind you at the same time I was also a perfectionist, which means you tend to see imperfections in others.

Now at a certain point the singer's voice broke as she was hitting a high note. But before I could mentally register the imperfection I heard or felt such a clear gentle voice that said: "that was the most beautiful part".

In an instant it reframed the imperfect into perfect for that moment and thus forever.

And that's what your quote encompasses. Good read, thanks for sharing.

npunt

an hour ago

Cracks in the voice are so visceral. One I love is in the Rolling Stone's Gimme Shelter, Merry Clayton is just about screaming and her voice cracks and they kept the band's cheering reaction to it on the record [1]. Truly a case of the subject matter trying to break out of the medium.

Related is that a lot of cultures embrace intentional imperfections in art for spiritual reasons, as it conveys authenticity and humility in the face of perfection. E.g. Persian flaw [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gimme_Shelter

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Persian_carpet#cite_note-68

101008

2 hours ago

In the same vein, the most beautiful part of Patti Smith performing "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall" at Nobel Prize Award Ceremony is when she mistakes the lyrics. Whenever I need to cry, I watch that video.

stgo

2 hours ago

There's also Marshall McLuhan:

- Every new medium obsolesces the previous one - which then becomes the content, or the art form, of the new medium.

- Once the old ground becomes content of a new situation, it appears to ordinary attention as aesthetic figure. At the same time, a new retrieval or nostalgia is born

BretonForearm

2 hours ago

> "Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature [...]

I bet the first viewers of VHS were busier with marveling at color, compactness and convenience instead of thinking of the new medium as something ugly and nasty. New technology that gets very popular usually starts as state of the art and impressive, and it's only in retrospect that people think of it in condescending way.

ahartmetz

an hour ago

I've always disliked VHS. Broadcast TV was available for comparison at the time and it looked much better.

DVD resolution seemed fine to me at the time - it does not seem fine anymore.

Cassettes were not great, not terrible compared to CDs. That is still the case because stereo audio doesn't get much better than CDs.

Conclusion: Whether something seems good at the time depends on availability of something similar but better.

achairapart

an hour ago

It was “good enough” for them at the time. Technology is and was always about something good enough for most people. But the Eno quote is about art and aesthetic.

npunt

2 hours ago

Sure the first first ones, but hedonic adaptation happens pretty quickly. If you watched a movie in the theaters and then got a VHS copy to watch on your TV at home, you'd notice the difference, especially if it was a well-worn copy. I remember being so excited about laserdiscs because they overcame the VHS noise.

dylan604

2 hours ago

I'm familiar with the quote. Still don't like this nostalgia-esque recreation. As someone that spent many hours in edit bays dealing with these tape based artifacts, seeing them now is not nostalgic but brings out a Pavlovian response nearly PTSD like triggering. However, I do understand why others less in the trenches of trying to avoid these types of issues would want it.

npunt

2 hours ago

We all want what we don't have. Back in the day we were desperate for a clearer picture and found these artifacts annoying. We longed for an alternate reality that was as crisp as our own. Nowadays folks that didn't experience the pre-digital era want aesthetics that embrace the imperfections that today's visual culture glosses over. They want reminders that life wasn't always this way.

Animats

2 hours ago

I'm getting really tired of seeing dust and scratches applied to YouTube video. Especially when it's applied to zooms and pans over stills.

BobbyTables2

2 hours ago

That is pretty good!

Hmm. Now that we have 1 terabyte 1000MB/s NVme drives, we can really be nostalgic about the 1.44Mb 3.5” floppy drives that have about 30KB/s throughput…

Might even be practical with the latest trends in storage pricing…

bel8

2 hours ago

The power of nostalgia.

BigTTYGothGF

5 hours ago

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.

superdisk

4 hours ago

This one does. You can configure the noise injected into the signal and when it gets too much, it loses sync and the picture starts rolling. It's actually a software NTSC modulator/demodulator, not just an effect to simulate it.

https://github.com/LMP88959/NTSC-CRT

jmbwell

4 hours ago

I sincerely appreciate this fidelity to fidelity

RgrTheShrubbr

2 hours ago

These are both amazing projects, but why does NTSC-CRT feel more accurate to how I remember television looking than ntsc-rs?

gregsadetsky

5 hours ago

I actually posted ntsc-rs as it came up in my research - I'm also looking for something like what you're describing..!

I was also looking into https://codeberg.org/fsphil/hacktv which generates a variety of different analog tv signals (meant to be broadcast using HackRF) - but yes, I want the opposite - an analog-receiver-emulator...? And one that would be "ok" with incorrect signals // fail like an analog TV would... :-)

JdeBP

6 hours ago

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.

stevesimmons

5 hours ago

Which is why NTSC was often said to mean Never Twice the Same Color!

reaperducer

4 hours ago

In my decades working in TV it was always "Never The Same Color."

See also: Picture At Last!

See also: System Essentially Contrary to the American Method

ReptileMan

an hour ago

French gonna french. I have always been fascinated by their engineering. There was this joke that Renault headquarters is 16 floors, on the 16 is the top brass, on the 15 are the engineers that design the cars, and the rest 14 floors try desperately to figure out how to assemble them.

xattt

4 hours ago

Good thing they fixed it in Always The Same Color.

atum47

an hour ago

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

zellyn

6 hours ago

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)

gblargg

4 hours ago

I educated anyone who asked about the NTSC filter over the years because I wanted to see less-optimized implementations of it, given how much faster hardware is than the mid 2000s (it precalculated the kernels for every color at every phase offset and did the signed RGB math during rendering). There's something satisfying about being able to recreate the peculiarities of old hardware we grew up with, as a way of demystifying it.

MycroftJones

2 hours ago

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.

1bpp

36 minutes ago

I used to play with the free iZotope Vinyl VST, it does a decent job at emulating pop/hiss, wow/flutter, and frequency response

liampulles

an hour ago

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.

peacedrone

2 hours ago

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!

devindotcom

6 hours ago

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.

nemomarx

6 hours ago

I'm actually surprised there isn't much of a scene for authentic camcorder footage - directors love to bust out real black and white film cameras for stuff?

devindotcom

5 hours ago

Film is a fun, interesting, authentic, and useful medium for filmmakers, and there are established workflows for it. A camcorder writing interlaced video to miniDV may have its charms (I still have a great old Panasonic 3CCD one) but as a filmmaking tool it would be really inconvenient. Shooting in an ordinary digital workflow and adding the effect later is a no brainer production-wise.

That said, I would not be surprised to see camcorders, DV or VHS or whatever, rise up as a Polaroid-like alternative to smartphone cameras! Old digital point and shoots are already popular that way.

xattt

4 hours ago

In 2009, I recorded a video of the after effects of a torrential downpour in Toronto on a Sony HDV camera. I also called up a few news stations to see if I could sell it.

I ended up reaching CFTO (CTV Toronto), and took the footage over to Channel 9 Court. What happened next took me by complete surprise.

The flagship station of a national network had no deck in the building that would play HDV mini DV tapes. I hadn’t brought my camcorder or my MBP either, so I couldn't quickly convert it into a format that they could use.

I ended up going home, and exporting via FCP and burning onto a DVD. It worked, I got to see the inside of a news station and I got $135 for it. The news broadcast later that day showed about 10 seconds of my footage, which by extrapolation, was the highest-ever hourly rate I’ve ever earned: ~$48,600/hour.

The lesson here was that DV and DV-adjacent workflows were difficult in a pro context even when they were mainstream in the consumer market.

kraussvonespy

an hour ago

This started long ago. In the 1980s, pros used 60 minute Umatic cassettes because it was the standard and it was the highest quality format. Home users had VHS and Beta (and laserdisc and CED discs and...) The pro market was mostly short videos / news segments / local insertion commercials so a 60 minute Umatic tape limitation was fine with the pros. In the home market, VHS won over Beta in part because the recording time was longer and it meant that most rental movies didn't need a second cassette and a swap in the middle of the movie. To your point, most video production companies had VHS and Beta decks if they needed home formats (I was playing with my VHS-C camcorder and caught that plane crash on tape), but even in the dark ages of NTSC, pros didn't want to use home formats unless they absolutely had to.

ClikeX

2 hours ago

For modern movies, where you likely need to adjust some things in the scene using CGI, it is much easier to just add VFX to a pristine 4k image and then deep fry it with something like this.

As for your second point. A friend of mine's little sister asked him for help setting up the vintage camera she bought. And it was an early 00s digital point & shoot.

bufordsharkley

4 hours ago

I've never been a smartphone user, and have moved from a Flip Camcorder, to various point-and-shoots in video mode (never liked very much), and just in the last 3 years, have discovered that Sony handicams are now pocket-sized, I never considered carrying around one before, but it's actually completely reasonable.

The model (HDRCX405) is wonderful, 30x optical zoom a real value-add over smartphones, but also I just love the ergonomics in general, very easy to pick it up, and start a video within a second.

That said, Sony discontinued the low-end handicam line last year (this model went from $200 new to $800 used), which is really unfortunately, right as I hope this niche might gain momentum.

sillywalk

4 hours ago

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

rpastuszak

5 hours ago

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

gregsadetsky

5 hours ago

Rafał!!! U+1F62D U+1F62D U+1F62D!!!! haha

I'll email you. sorry everyone, just two pal's pall'ing around xx

RgrTheShrubbr

an hour ago

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

modinfo

4 hours ago

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.

jmbwell

4 hours ago

I might argue that generating and decoding an actual NTSC signal, as the OP project does, would be true in ways that a generative model based on all of that would not be.

marginalia_nu

4 hours ago

Can't you just cut out the AI from this pipeline by recording footage onto VHS and then digitizing that?

caminanteblanco

3 hours ago

I think the idea would be allowing arbitrary videos to be converted without the need for a working tape drive

fs90

an hour ago

That's interesting!

joshuamcginnis

4 hours ago

I wonder if any of this was used to produce Backrooms

therepanic

5 hours ago

It looks quite unusual, I will definitely try it.

nekiwo

6 hours ago

never expected valadaptive to be on front page of HN

natas

6 hours ago

pretty cool!

fnord77

4 hours ago

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

quantummagic

4 hours ago

I hope this leads to people being interested in more and larger public gatherings. Seeing things with our own eyes and having fun with other real people.

elpocko

4 hours ago

This will be the thing that does it. That sounds reasonable.