Glitch and VHS on Your Desktop

This is not one filter over the whole screen but two separate layers with different characters. You can turn them on together or one at a time.

• Glitch. Short strips of the picture shift sideways and snap back at once, and now and then a shift line runs down the screen from top to bottom. Three levels: rare, medium, often.
• VHS. Four parts: color fringing on the edges, where the red and blue channels drift apart by a couple of pixels, a slight horizontal softness, a fine jitter of the lines and flickering grain. There is no running line here, that belongs to glitch.
• Together. Glitch plus VHS gives you a picture from a tape that is also catching a bad signal. You can put particles on top and parallax underneath, all the layers live at the same time.
• On any wallpaper. A picture from a pack, your own photo or video wallpaper. On a clip the glitch is drawn by the video process itself, and for VHS only the grain and jitter work for now, without color fringing.

Both effects live in the Effects tab, each in its own row.

1. Install Vealo from Steam, open the panel and click the gear, that is the Studio.
2. The Effects tab, the Glitch row: Rare, Medium or Often. For a background that stays on all day, "Rare" is usually enough; "Often" is already a show.
3. The VHS row: one toggle. The fringing and softness are baked into a copy of the wallpaper within a second, the grain and jitter appear right away.
4. The STRENGTH slider is separate for each effect: from barely noticeable to harsh.

Both effects are part of Pro. Like the other locked effects, you can try them: click the chip and the effect runs for real on your wallpaper for five seconds.

Glitch and VHS mean redrawing a transparent layer over the whole monitor, and that is what costs the graphics card, not the strips themselves.

• The FRAMES row for glitch: 30 or 60 per second. At 30 the effect is half as expensive, and to the eye it hardly differs, because the strips appear in jerks anyway.
• VHS computes the fringing and softness once, when you turn it on or change the wallpaper. Only the grain and jitter live in the frame, and they run 24 times a second, like film.
• Vealo does not keep the copy of the wallpaper for glitch and VHS twice: if parallax is on, both effects take the picture from it and move together with it.
• Game mode: a game or video goes full screen, and the layer freezes on every monitor, the graphics card is free.

A couple of things worth knowing before you decide the effect is broken.

• Full VHS with fringing and jitter works on a clean desktop, when the icons are tucked away in the Vealo panel: otherwise its copy of the wallpaper would cover the icons. With the icons shown, only the grain remains, it is semi-transparent and hides nothing.
• In the SCREEN row pick a monitor: glitch on one, VHS on the other, or All everywhere. Each monitor has its own level.
• The effect makes it into the setup preview: when you save a setup or publish it to the Workshop, a still frame with glitch and VHS is baked into the picture, and people see the desktop the way you have it.
• Ready-made desktops with these effects are in the Steam Workshop: setups on our site, applied with one click inside Vealo.