Add a VHS Look or Pencil, Neon and Thermal Effects to Any Video

A VHS filter and 10 more effects in one tool

This video filter tool gives your clip a real VHS look, with scanlines, tracking noise and color bleed, or one of five artistic styles: pencil sketch, cross-hatch, thermal vision, neon and ink. That's 11 styles in total. A live WebGL shader draws the effect on the preview as you switch styles, so you see the result before you render anything. Drop in an MP4, MOV, MKV or WebM file, pick a style, and download an MP4 with the effect baked in and the original sound kept. You don't need an account, and the MP4 comes out without a watermark.

VHS filter: 6 retro tape looks

The VHS filter is six tape presets built on one shader. Each mixes scanlines, tracking noise, chroma bleed, vignetting and tape warmth differently, to match a different decade and a different state of tape.

The VHS presets also add film-style extras on top of the tape damage: a warm halation glow around bright highlights, a cool-shadow and warm-highlight split tone, lens-style color fringing toward the edges, and a soft light leak that drifts across the frame. Every preset comes with its settings already dialed in, so picking one is enough to get a believable result. If you're curious how the effect is built, I broke down every layer in how VHS filters work.

Pencil sketch filter

The pencil sketch filter takes a different rendering path from the VHS presets. Soft graphite tones model the light and shadow of your footage, broken contour lines trace the shapes, and it all sits on warm paper. The paper texture stays still between frames instead of flickering, which is what makes it read as a drawing rather than a noisy video.

It works best on footage with clear shapes and decent contrast: a face, a hand, a product against a plain background. Busy, low-contrast scenes give it less form to draw. Use the live preview to judge how the graphite reads on your clip before you render.

Cross-hatch filter

The cross-hatch filter is the engraving or woodcut version. It shades each part of the frame with up to four layers of diagonal hatching, stacked more densely where the image is darker. The result looks like a printed illustration or an old etching, which suits title cards, transitions or a whole clip styled like a storybook. Try it next to the pencil sketch on the same clip; the two suit different footage.

Ink filter

The ink filter is black and white only. Bold inked contours outline the shapes, a fine 45-degree halftone screentone handles the midtones, and the darkest areas become clean solid black on warm paper. It's the comic and manga look, and it holds up well on clips with strong silhouettes, like a person walking, a car passing or a skater against the sky.

Thermal vision filter

The thermal vision filter maps each pixel's brightness onto a black, purple, orange and yellow ramp, the same palette FLIR and infrared cameras use. Ordinary footage turns into what looks like heat-signature imaging, handy for sci-fi or action edits or a "predator vision" joke clip. Because brightness drives it, well-lit footage with strong light and shadow gives the most convincing hot-versus-cold contrast. Flat, evenly lit footage still gets the colors, just with less drama.

Neon cyberpunk filter

The neon filter finds the edges in your footage and lights them up in cyan and magenta over a near-black background, with a slight red-blue split along the glowing lines. It re-renders the whole frame instead of laying a color grade over it, so it keeps its punch at any resolution. People use it for trailer-style edits, gaming clips and anything meant to feel like a night city.

How the video filter works without an upload

Every style runs through one WebGL2 shader inside your browser tab. Your browser decodes the video frame by frame, each frame goes through the shader for the style you chose, and the browser's own encoder writes the result to a new MP4. No part of that pipeline involves a server, so "no upload" is literally true.

I added three things most browser video tools skip:

• Long clips don't crash the tab. The output is written to a scratch file on disk as it renders, instead of being held in memory. Keeping everything in memory is why many browser tools die on anything longer than a couple of minutes.
• File size stays reasonable. Animated grain and hard-edged line art are close to the worst content a video codec can get. The encoder targets a bitrate scaled to your resolution, so a pencil or neon render doesn't balloon to several times the source size.
• Phone videos come out upright. Vertical clips often carry rotation metadata. The tool writes the output already rotated correctly, so it doesn't get turned a second time on playback.

The output is always a standard MP4 with H.264 video and AAC audio that plays anywhere. The live preview is muted on purpose so you can flick through styles quickly, but the file you download keeps the original soundtrack.

One page instead of an app for every look

VHS apps and artistic effect apps are usually separate downloads, often tied to one platform and locked behind a subscription after a few uses. I put all 11 looks on one free page that works the same on Mac, Windows, iPhone, Android and Chromebook. I don't add a watermark or limit how many clips you render in a day. Since you can preview every style on the same clip, you pick the look before you spend time rendering.

Frequently asked questions