What it does
The full worn videotape package: color bleed, static, dropouts, wobble, and tracking errors.
VHS stored video as diagonal magnetic stripes on half-inch tape, read by heads spinning against it 30 times a second. Almost everything we recognize as "the VHS look" is that mechanism failing slightly. The image wobbles because the tape speed is never perfectly constant. The band of noise at the bottom of the frame is the moment the player switches from one head to the other. Tracking errors, the horizontal tears you fixed by mashing the tracking button, happen when the head sweeps miss the center of each stripe.
Color is its own story. VHS recorded color at a fraction of the bandwidth of brightness, so chroma smears sideways and arrives slightly late, bleeding reds and blues past their edges. Dropouts, the white streaks and sparkles, are literal gaps where oxide flaked off the tape. Stack a decade of re-recording and rental-store wear on top and you get the texture people now chase on purpose.
A real VHS effect models those failures individually, so you can dial in anything from a tape played twice to one the machine tried to eat. Because the artifacts are generated per frame, they move the way tape damage moves, which is the difference between simulation and a static filter.
Signature looks
Rental tape
Gentle wobble, softened detail, faint noise, color a half-step behind. A tape that has been through a dozen weekends.
Eaten by the machine
Heavy tracking bands, a crease rolling through the frame, dropouts streaking the highlights. The tape the VCR nearly kept.
Camcorder memory
Low resolution, drifting chroma, a hum bar crawling up the picture. Home-video warmth, one bad ceiling light included.
Try it on your own footage
This effect runs live in the Modulate editor, free with no signup — or start from the free tool page for a guided setup.
Common questions
What causes the VHS look?
The look is the sum of the format’s physical limits: low luma resolution (about 240 lines), color recorded at a fraction of that bandwidth, mechanical wobble in the tape transport, head-switching noise at the bottom of the frame, tracking errors, and dropouts where the magnetic coating wore away.
What are the lines at the bottom of VHS footage?
That band is head-switching noise: the visible seam where the player switches from one spinning video head to the other at the end of each field. TVs of the era overscanned and cropped it off, so it only became famous once VHS was watched on screens that show the full frame.
Why does VHS color look smeared?
VHS used color-under recording, storing chroma at far lower bandwidth than brightness. Color edges spread sideways and lag the luma they belong to, so reds and blues bleed past their outlines. A good VHS effect reproduces that lag rather than just desaturating the image.
How do I make my video look like VHS?
Run it through a VHS effect that simulates the tape rather than compositing a noise overlay. Modulate’s free VHS tool works on video and images in your browser: drop a file in, tune wobble, tracking, chroma bleed, dropouts, and noise, and export. No signup, and nothing uploads to a server.
Should I add a CRT effect on top of VHS?
Often, yes. VHS artifacts come from the tape and player, CRT artifacts (scanlines, phosphor glow, curvature) come from the display it was watched on. Footage from the era shows both at once, so stacking a CRT effect over VHS reads as more authentic than either alone.
Related effects
CRT effect
The look of an old tube monitor: glowing phosphor stripes, slight color fringing, and a darkened vignette.
NTSC effect
The look of an analog TV broadcast: soft edges, color bleed, scanlines, and signal noise.
Halftone effect
Turns the image into printed dot patterns, from single-color newspaper dots to full four-ink color screens.