For years there have been various glitch effects available for After Effects (and Premiere) with many offering to recreate that look of VHS, however even fairly expensive plug-ins have failed to really recreate the look.
A few years ago Red Giant created a wonderful VHS plug-in but then spoiled it by making it part of a package requiring a subscription, the plug-ins that form Red Giant Universe are just not worth the cost for occasional use.
Having contemplated buying an actual VHS player to create the VHS look, by pure good fortune an email landed in our inbox from aescripts and we noticed they had a fairly new plug-in called Signal, it instantly looked like a VHS blurry dream come true.
To give the plug-in a run for its money, we decided to make the Mandalorian look like it had been made back in the day by editing in the style of Space 1999 with Signal applied.
If we had one niggle it would be, it almost makes the footage look too bad by default so it needs toning down a bit in the settings, but for the money, it’s a truly awesome plug-in. An improvement we would like to see is some built-in presets and the ability to change the settings and save that as a custom preset.
If you want to make digital video look like analogue drone FPV, like an analogue CCTV camera or a VHS recording this plug-in should be at the top of your list.
If the team at FXhome ever read this, then they need to come up with something similar for HitFilm. HitFilm is an editing and compositing package in one product, so it’s much more intuitive then working between Premiere and After Effects, we personally use Ignite which allows the effects in HitFilm to be used in Adobe products.
At the time of writing, Signal was available for $39.99.
