Major Project: Video Copilot 'Twitch' Plug-in VFX Tests #1

Today I spent some time working with the Video Copilot plug-in 'Twitch'. This plugin helps streamline the process of creating glitch effects and while it contains some presets, you do not get good results for free. Even when testing out some of the presets I often had to re-work them with some custom settings. I found if I did not spend time going in and tweaking the settings, the results were far too extreme or bizarre...but it gave me a good starting point.

Also to note - the footage I used for these tests may not be the final clips (for example - my grandfather's clip), I'm just using my pre-vis to experiment with. Some of the tests below showcase the presets with some tweaks I've made to tone them down and apply them to the shots better.

Glitch Test 001 - Custom Settings

Glitch Test 002 - Color Tearing Preset

Glitch 003 Test - Crazy Man Preset

Video Copilot Twitch Plug-in

This plug-in is a large time saver as it takes all of the settings I would have needed to create good glitch effects and organises them in a more intuitive manner rather than me creating them by creating several pre-compositions and layers. I can choose what aspects of the glitch I want - including blurring, colour/tint, light/brightness, movement of the footage (slide or scale), and time (so the footage jumps forward or backward making it appear jittery). There are also more effects are under different categories, such as RGB splitting under 'slide' - an effect that I think works well for certain shots in my film to bring some colour into the sterile white space.

Glitch Test 004 - Side Swiped Preset

Glitch Test 005 - Bloom Preset

Glitch Test 006 - 360 Spin Preset

I've really enjoyed playing with this so far and I think it will give me really creative and dynamic methods for transitioning between shots in addition to my light flickers. I think it will also be effective for adding greater distortion to more 'disordered' entities in combination with other effects. I look forward to testing this out some more to see what I can do with it.