Datamoshing For Mac

Posted : admin | On 15-09-2021

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.

Data Glitch is a native After Effects plugin that creates awesome realistic digital image glitches with total ease. Something you would see during a satellite transmission or a cable broadcast or from a damaged disk. Bad TV plugin is great for analog TV look, but this is 2010 and you hardly see anything that's analog anymore. ‎With Moshup you can do live datamoshing on your iPhone or iPad. Capture a short clip and then film something different. The first recording will be transformed by the motion of your second recording. You can create some interesting mapping effects. You can also repeat Frames in order or randomly.

1. Datamoshing

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.

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.

Sign In

Register

Access to orders in your account history
Ability to add projects to a Favorites list
Fast checkout with saved credit cards
Personalized order invoices

Create Account

I’ve started playing around with video art.

In particular, I’m exploring how to make destructive effects with datamoshing and how to generate style transfers with deep learning. The results are unpredictable and weird. It’s fun.

I’ve made a video art repo to track my work. It has links to resources I’ve found helpful and code for manipulating video and running command-line scripts.

Here are my findings so far.

Datamoshing

Avidemux

Avidemux is a free tool commonly used for datamoshing. You can also do basic video editing with it, though many people edit the original videos in some other software (e.g. Premiere).

Here are some good introductions to Avidemux:

Other handy tools to have are VLC for viewing and converting a variety of video files and ffmpeg as a general command-line video utility.

Many people report that Avidemux doesn’t work as well for datamoshing on newer versions of OS X (I don’t know about Windows or Linux). Some people recommend using a different operating system (e.g. with VirtualBox).

I tried downloading Avidemux 2.5.4 based on these instructions — TUTORIAL How to install avidemux for datamoshing on Mac OS X - Art! - Glitchet Forum — but it wouldn’t load on my system (OSX Mojave).

That said, Avidemux 2.7.1 seems to be stable on a fully updated Mac. Here are instructions for using a later version (> 2.7) of Avidemux: Datamoshing using Avidemux 2.7.0. Using these settings, I was able to get some glitch effects, but they were hit or miss. Your mileage may vary.

Other tools

This is a comprehensive list of resources for making glitch art: Glitchet: Art Resources

Scripts

These are command-line tools for datamoshing and glitching videos: