XR Retro Analog
Mac only, no Windows version. Download with a free account - created in 30 seconds.
The look of vintage monitors, right inside After Effects. The plugin redraws your image as glowing pixels: brightness decides which pixels light up - a threshold, a grid, a pixel shape - then the phosphor colors everything and the glow makes the screen halate. Exposure and contrast are set upstream to keep the image readable once rasterized.
The pixel as material
Tile size from 2 to 120 px and seven pixel shapes: soft square, bars, scanlines, dot, cross, diamond, noise. The threshold decides how many pixels make it into the light - that's what sculpts the image.
Vintage monitor
Green phosphor, amber, cyan, black & white - or a free tritone with your own shadow, midtone and highlight colors. Dual two-radius glow for the phosphor halo, grain and sharpen to finish.
Glitch & frame rate
Horizontal banded displacement - amplitude, band height, noise complexity, wrapped edges - and an apparent frame rate à la posterize time, applicable to the effect alone, the image alone, or both.
Requirements
- Recent macOS
- Apple Silicon or Intel - universal plugin, no Rosetta
- After Effects (SmartFX API, since CC 2015)
- About 2 MB of disk space
- No internet connection required
License
Personal plugin, distributed as is, without warranty. All the code is original; it embeds no third-party model or asset.
Found a bug, got an idea?
Private message, sent directly to Xavier Reyé with the plugin name. Nothing is published. Leave an email address to get a reply.
