For a side project creating a shader that added VHS degradation effect (for the end result of that-- shader posted here).

I was looking around for reference material. For some reason I was having trouble finding good stuff in the form of other shaders. I was put off by how common it was to mix tape degredation effect with CRT monitor style distortion and scanline artifacts (scanlines which cannot be chalked up to tape banding). I guess it's not cool to have one without the other? I wanted to reproduce a degraded tape. But, not the experience of someone pointing a camera at a monitor.

Since I couldn't readily (in the like ~15s of searching) find the type of video comparison I was looking for I quickly made one using a rip of one of my old anime tapes (I used like this $20 USB-composite dongle attached to my VCR) and the DVD re-release of the same thing.

Left: DVD
Right: VHS

Blown-out colors, blurriness. The real money areas were the band of distortion at the bottom and left... The tape, despite being nearly 30 years old, didn't look as 'bad' as I was hoping. It didn't look s***ty enough to be directly taken as reference. I used it as a starting point, and hammed it up a lot for the shader.

If you were to attack this problem a different way you could do an ML style transfer. I did this in a non-ML way because I wanted some control over the warping and noise, some debuggability, rather than just "throwing more and more data at the problem until it looks right".

The resulting shader is here: https://github.com/clandrew/vapor/blob/master/VaporPlus/PostprocessPS.hlsl