public access TV look
The public access TV look: a low-budget cable studio picture with tube cameras, bad chroma keys, hum bars and tape wear, recreated in After Effects.
THE LOOK
The public access TV look is the picture of a cable channel run by volunteers: a bare studio, two or three tube cameras on pedestals, a character generator crawl at the bottom, and a signal that went through U-matic or VHS before reaching the cable headend. Tube cameras gave smeary highlights, comet trails behind bright moving objects, and color that drifted as the cameras warmed up. Cameras were rarely matched, so a cut between two angles could change white balance. Lighting came from a few fixtures, which left faces shiny and backgrounds murky. Chroma key was available but often used badly, with a green or blue fringe and flickering edges. Audio hum from poorly shielded cables sometimes showed up on screen as a slow horizontal band rolling through the picture. The result reads as sincere, local, amateur and a little strange. Today editors use it for sketch comedy, satire of talk shows, documentary inserts, retro music video and horror set in a late-night broadcast. The most convincing versions keep the composition simple, locked, and badly lit, then let the signal add trails, softness and soft instability. Do not over-glitch it: a public access show was meant to be watched.
WHAT DEFINES IT
Soft smear and comet trailing from tube pickups, medium. Chroma bleed and drifting color balance, medium. Slow hum bar rolling vertically, light. Mild time-base wobble and the occasional head-switching strip from tape dubs, light. Noise from analog cable reception, light to medium. Chroma-key fringe, if present, is a compositing flaw you add yourself at the edges of a subject, medium. Lighting is flat and hot, so grade skin slightly shiny rather than filmic.
THE ARTIFACTS IN THIS LOOK
THE RECIPE
ECHO PARASITE
SETTINGS ECHO 20, ECHO DECAY 55, PARASITE SMEAR 15
Use ECHO with a long ECHO DECAY for the trailing behind movement that tube cameras produced. PARASITE SMEAR adds horizontal softness. Keep ECHO GHOSTS off, because this is lag, not a hallway of images. If the shot is locked off, trails will be subtle, so lean on smear.
PAY WHAT YOU CAN $29 SUGGESTED NAME YOUR PRICE
PHANTOM CORRUPT
SETTINGS PHANTOM BLEED 40, PHANTOM NOISE 20, PHANTOM DECAY 15
Place after ECHO PARASITE. PHANTOM BLEED supplies color smear and helps with the cheap chroma-key fringe look. Keep PHANTOM NOISE lowest of the three. For a hum bar, add a thin keyframed band with a separate adjustment layer or add DRIFT ROLL from STATIC DRIFT at a slow rate.
PAY WHAT YOU CAN $29 SUGGESTED NAME YOUR PRICE
QUESTIONS
- Why do tube cameras leave trails?
- A tube pickup stores charge on a target as the scene is scanned, and bright moving objects leave a lingering image because the target does not fully discharge between fields. That lag appears as a soft comet tail, strongest on lights and highlights.
- How do I build the character generator crawl?
- Do it in a text layer with a blocky sans or slab face, white on a dark bar, scrolling at a steady speed. Put it below the effect stack so it smears with the picture. Real crawls were low resolution and slightly jittery.
- Should I add scan lines?
- Subtly, if at all. Public access ran on cable to ordinary televisions, so lines came from the display rather than the broadcast. If you simulate display, do it on a separate top layer so you can remove it for platforms that recompress badly.