VHS Wobble After Effects

Question

Does anyone know how to achieve the specific wobble of the VHS tape that can be seen here:

(it's throughout the video, but you can best see it if you look at the "Radio Shack" letters.)

Is it some sort of turbulent displace effect?

Note: I have Red Giant's VHS effect and have tried countless other plugins and presets and none of them have the option to produce realistic VHS wobble like this one.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Replicating an accurate VHS-look is a complicated profession, but if you are not worried about the technical accuracy you could emulate it like this:

• Create a solid called "Displace-Map"
• Apply turbulent noise to it
• set the scaling to something huge in the x-axis and something reasonable (100%) on the y-axis.
• alt-click the stopwatch on "evolution" and enter "time*100", so that the noise changes with time.
• Apply "Displacement-Map" to the layer you're trying to displace
• Set your "Displace-Map"-layer as the displace-map in the effect
• Dial up the displacement until it looks about right
• Don't forget to hide the Displace-Map solid and select "Masks&Effects" under the settings in the Displacement-Map effect, so it also reads the turbulent noise.

You might want to adjust the speed of the turbulent noise. To do that, just up the number you multiply time with in the evolution-expression.

I hope this helped, cheers!