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Analog VHS — Introduction

Analog VHS turns any camera into a worn tape deck, a broadcast monitor or a haunted camcorder. One AnalogVhsEffect component carries the whole effect — nine independent modules following the signal chain from the lens to the glass of the tube, rendered in shared fullscreen passes across Built-in, URP and HDRP. There is no profile asset in the middle: the settings live directly on the component, so what the inspector shows is what renders.

Real composite bandwidth limiting, not a blur filter

The Composite Signal module stores luma at half resolution and re-sharpens it with an unsharp mask, and chroma at roughly 1/16 resolution with a horizontal delay — the actual mechanism behind composite-video color bleed, adapted from a from-scratch Shadertoy-style study of how a real VHS/CRT signal degrades.

What ships in the package​

Unity6000.0 or newer
Render pipelinesBuilt-in, URP 17+, HDRP 17+
Modules9 — Lens, Retro Resolution, Tape Artifacts, Distortion, Composite Signal, Colour Quantization, Colour Grade, Bloom, CRT Screen
Presets20, from a clean VCR to full signal chaos
SetupOne-click pipeline diagnose-and-apply tool
DependenciesNone — the shared shader library has no pipeline package includes

Highlights​

  • Nine modules, all on the camera, no profile asset — each with its own master toggle, and a module that is off costs nothing. A slider you drag in Play mode changes the picture on that frame instead of quietly editing a shared asset you'd have to undo later.
  • Real lens chromatic aberration and lens dirt — lateral dispersion sampled as a spectral smear from the optical axis, zero in the centre and widening toward the corners, plus dust and cleaning scratches lit by the halation behind them.
  • One place for colour — every colour decision (tape levels, chroma response, exposure, lift/gamma/gain, saturation, split toning) lives in a single Colour Grade module, with 13 built-in looks to start from.
  • CRT screen model — beam reconstruction that rebuilds every pixel from the two raster lines around it, a 15-architecture phosphor mask, radial beam convergence error, edge-pinned barrel curvature and phosphor afterglow.
  • Analog-horror toolkit — a drifting tracking line that collapses a band of rows onto one, per-line hue phase error, wavy scanline distortion and one-sided horizontal tape smear.
  • Pipeline-independent core — Built-in via OnRenderImage, URP via a RenderGraph Renderer Feature, HDRP via a Custom Pass, all driving the same shared HLSL library.
  • One-click pipeline setup — Tools > Deepwave > Analog VHS > Setup Current Pipeline diagnoses the active pipeline and open scene, then wires up the renderer feature or custom pass volume, loads a starting preset and converts materials authored for another pipeline.
  • Tools overview — see Analog VHS alongside Deepwave's other Unity packages
  • The package's own QuickGuide.html (included with the Package Manager install) covers every module, all 20 presets and the full C# API in detail.