Glitch

Before · AfterPlay with it

The sample with the Kinetic Cut preset. Drag to compare, or press Play with it to tune it live. Open as a shared look

What it's like

A title slams onto the screen and for a fraction of a second it isn't sure where it belongs. The red and the cyan pull apart, a band of letters jumps sideways, a few squares of the picture turn to garbage. Then it locks in, sharp and still, until the next hit. That stop and start is the whole point. A glitch that never stops reads as a broken file. A glitch that comes in bursts reads as energy.

When to reach for it

• Big type that snaps. Start from the Kinetic Cut look: two hard bursts a loop over light scanlines. Put a Text layer under it and press Hit to feel it.
• Music. Set Trigger to Beat and Glitch fires on every hit in your track.
• A broken feed. Signal Lost tears rows, adds static and the odd inverted frame, for found-footage and surveillance edits.
• Something always a little wrong. Broken Signal keeps a faint split and drifting slices on all the time.

How it works

Glitch works in bursts. In Bursts it picks moments in the loop, spread out by Scatter, and at each one it hits at full strength and fades out over Length. Between bursts the picture is clean unless you raise Between. Every burst lands at the same place in every loop, so the loop and the export stay exact. Inside a burst the slices, blocks and static change 24 times a second, and Variation picks a different pattern for all of them.

Controls

20 controls in 7 sections, in the order Tune shows them.

Bursts

• SelectTrigger AlwaysBurstsBeat

  When it glitches. Always keeps it on. Bursts hits a set number of times a loop. Beat fires on the beats of your track, or falls back to Bursts when there's no audio.

• SelectPer loop 1248

  How many bursts a loop: 1, 2, 4 or 8.

• KnobLength 50 ms to 600 ms · rests at 215 ms

  How long each burst lasts, from 50 to 600 ms.

• KnobScatter 0 to 100 · rests at 50

  How far the bursts wander from an even spacing.

• KnobBetween 0 to 100 · rests at 0

  How much glitch stays on between bursts.

• KnobVariation 0 to 100 · rests at 37

  A different pattern of slices, blocks and burst times.

Split

• Hero knobSplit 0 to 100 · rests at 45

  The hero. How far the color channels pull apart.

• KnobAngle 0° to 360° · rests at 0°

  Which way the channels pull.

• SelectChannels Red · cyanMagenta · greenBlue · yellowRGB

  Which colors split. Red · cyan, Magenta · green, Blue · yellow, or full RGB.

Slices

• KnobSlices 0 to 100 · rests at 40

  How many bands of the picture jump.

• KnobShift 0 to 100 · rests at 45

  How far the bands jump.

• SwitchDirection AcrossDown

  Bands slide Across or Down.

Corrupt

• KnobBlocks 0 to 100 · rests at 25

  How much of the picture breaks into corrupted squares, some with their colors swapped.

• SelectBlock size 8163264

  How big the squares are, from 8 to 64 pixels.

• KnobStatic 0 to 100 · rests at 15

  Static through the burst.

Motion

• KnobShake 0 to 100 · rests at 25

  Shakes the whole frame during a burst.

• KnobTear 0 to 100 · rests at 0

  Thin rows drag sideways, like tape losing hold.

• KnobInvert 0 to 100 · rests at 0

  Now and then a whole frame flips to its negative.

Mix

• KnobMix 0 to 100 · rests at 100

  How much of the glitch shows over the picture.

Buttons

• Pulse buttonHit Momentary · fires and falls back · can be recorded

  Press for a burst right now.

Presets

7 presets. Each one opens in the studio as a shared look. Add it on top of your picture, or save it to My looks.