aescripts + aeplugins

Tim Drage

Looks nice, right up my street!!

Just one suggestion: with the ZX Spectrum pallette it would be good if it could emulate colour clash/attribute clash somehow.

Ryan Paterson

hahaha that demo video is so good. Gonna grab this as soon as I have the right project for it

Ivan Zlobov

Thanks a lot, guys! 

Having attribute clash? Wait, but no one was enjoying it just 25 years ago  

Seriously, it's really good idea. We'll consider adding it (not sure if it should be custom palette option of Retrodither or an extra blending effect for convenience, though).

Aapo Saaristo

This is really nice.
Suggestion: Add non-square downscales (for C64 et al) 2x1, 4x2 etc. For simplicity, a checkbox like "double pixel width" would be a simple solution, UI wise. (This is of course easily hacked togheter by hand but, to be fair, so is the actual downscaling ánd it'd be nice to have everyting under a single effect :P)

Anyway, like I said, really awesome plugin. Together wit l3tt3rm4pp3r, Rowbyte's Data Glitch and some real deal datamoshing one can create some _AWESOME_ visuals.

e: to be clear, I'm talking about the C64 MultiColor and FLI modes (and to a degree, the MCI mode), both of which use a 160x200 resolution, but allow more colors than the 320x200 HiRes and IFLI modes.

Lloyd Alvarez

Anyway, like I said, really awesome plugin. Together wit l3tt3rm4pp3r, Rowbyte's Data Glitch and some real deal datamoshing one can create some _AWESOME_ visuals.

Please share any cool stuff you make with this recipe!  Sounds pretty awesome..

Ivan Zlobov

Hi Aapo, and yes, please share what you did, we're really interested to see our product in action.

Regarding non-square pixels, well, i think we might decouple w/h downsampling (otherwise it would be too many options); but it would break backward compatibility for existing projects. Anyway it's cool suggestion, we just need to think it through. Thanks!

Simon Dronet

Thanks for this plugin. It's a great idea and well made.

But I have a problem. On my both configurations (iMac (AEF 5.5) and Macbook Pro (AEF 5)) I have an Open GL issue when I load RetroDither :

"After Effects Warning : a problem occured when processing OpenGL commands"

That appeared as soon I applied the effect to a layer... so I can't use it at all.

Have you got any idea to solve my problem ? 

Ivan Zlobov

Hi Simon. Thanks for your kind words and a bug report. 

Well, it's quite fuzzy bug which appears on several combinations of older versions of AE+opengl based plugins on OSX. (Not specifically RD, basically all vendors of opengl-accelerated plugins had to work this issue around at some point).

However, we've only had this issue with cs5@osx happening while closing the AE. 

If you're saying it happens even on the start, it's bad news for us (never reported during tests) and we'll try to look deeper into it. 

Please file a bug ticket in the support section, so the process would be more convenient.

So far we'd suggest either using AE CS6+ on OSX or any supported AE version on windows.

Simon Dronet

Thanks to you.

I'll try to make this bug ticket.

Unfortunately, I installed Maverick on my two Mac before knowing that CS6 won't work on it...

Ivan Zlobov

Ok, fixes are public now.

luis mercado

Hi, I tried to use the demo because I want to apply this. But most of the times it makes Premiere to hangs. The lone time it did not make it hang while applying it hanged while toying with the options.

Using Premiere CC 2014 on a Macbook Air 2014.

Ivan Zlobov

Hi Luis. Well, unfortunately the only solution I could suggest in your case (not counting changing the hardware) is switching to AE to tune the desired look and then either render in AE or export back to Premiere and render there. The problem is, latest Premiere is really squeezing everything possible from your computer's resources, running several rendering threads simultaneously, in a much more intensive way than Ae. And since Air's compute performance isn't really up to usual editing workstations which are targets for Premiere, this becomes a problem - relatively little overhead of using the plugin is being multiplied by way more times than your device is supposed to handle, and we can't really manage it in the plugin. Since AE is much less demanding in how many stuff it wants to be computed in parallel, it should be easier just to apply/tune the effect there.

luis mercado

Would a downgrade to Premiere CS6 would solve the problem? I don't really need all the bells and whistles of CC 2014 anyway.

Ivan Zlobov

I'm afraid that wouldn't help, since Premiere uses more or less the same multithreaded playback since CS5 iirc.

Robert Simmons

seems to crash on AE 2015. are you guys working on an update?

Ivan Zlobov

Yes. (Shouldn't be an actual crash though, just a warning from AECC2015 and  a black screen. If you're having an AE crash, please file a ticket and attach a crash log and info about your system)

Sorry, it was quite a surprise for us. We'll try to deal with this real quick.

Robert Simmons

Hey guys, sorry I just said crash but i really didn't crash, its moreso it would fail to work. (I'm so used to using crash for AE problems since most of them are usually crash issues that I use it as generic term for all AE related problems) but looks like you guys are already aware. Thank you for prompt response

Ivan Zlobov

Done!  CC2015 compatible version is online.

Robert Fransson

I can't get 1.3 to show up in after effects, any idea what could be wrong?

It's the only plugin that doesn't have an effect icon 

I'm on a mac OSX 10.10.3 running CC2015.

Ivan Zlobov

Sorry for that. Please just download the archive again.

Aapo Saaristo

Something I'd love to see in RetroDither: after limiting the palette to certain colors, limit certain areas (1/2/4 rows, 1/2/4 columns, 4/8/16 pixel square) to a number of colors similar to what older systems like ZX Spectrum did.

So first limit colors to, say, a palette of 12 unique color entires, then limit to 2 colors per row, or 4 colors per 8x8 square or 6 colors per 2 columns etc.

The best implementation of this effect I've found is in the Android application 8Bit Photo Lab. I've crafted a system with the Android automation tool RepetiTouch to run my video frames through 8Bit Photo Lab for a project I'm working on, but obviously this is about as far as you can get from an optimal workflow; it's slow, error-prone and the smallest change requires redoing the whole process

Kert Gartner

Is there any possible way we can load custom palettes in a future version! That's killing me at the moment

Ivan Zlobov

Aapo, oh, you mean ZX chunks? We've been thinking about this feature for sure, but we've decided that it would be too specific for RD. 

We could implement it in another simple plugin though. 

Also, are you sure you actually need the color limiting feature at all? 

Did you think about l3tt3rm4pp3r approach instead? Like, mapping a picture  through the set of dithered glyphs - because chunky look is more about a texture than colors (well, that's just my point of view -  i might be wrong, if you think i am, please correct me. . 

There are even chunk editors on ZX, where you can edit chunks pixel by pixel, as you would do with LM texture iirc.

Ivan Zlobov

Is there any possible way we can load custom palettes in a future version! That's killing me at the moment

Kert, well, the biggest problem is, we're not sure how the user is supposed to prepare such palette and manage the color mapping (the way to decide eg which color from the limited 4-color palette should be used for a particular pixel having a color from 16bit color range). 

Please note that you still can use every non-adaprtive mode of Retrodither as source of such custom palette - you just need to adjust colors according to your case using AE color correction tools (eg 'change color' effect).

Aapo Saaristo

Also, are you sure you actually need the color limiting feature at all? 

Did you think about l3tt3rm4pp3r approach instead? Like, mapping a picture  through the set of dithered glyphs - because chunky look is more about a texture than colors (well, that's just my point of view -  i might be wrong, if you think i am, please correct me. . 

Well, for the Spectrum ZX look you could go with LM of course, since the limit of colors per chunk is conveniently two. It would be very difficult to use LM to simulate a 2 or four color limit per scanline, though, which is the effect I'm currently going for. 

I realize things like this are totally outside of the spec for RetroDither, RD being just a simple dither filter, and not a full blown "retro computer video simulator". I just thought I'd throw the idea out there, as when I was first starting to figure out how to achieve the look I'm going for with this project, I immediately thought of RetroDither, but sadly quickly found it lacking.

I've since replaced my clunky Android-based set-up with a simple C# program that runs the frames through a few GLSL shaders to do the color remapping, which has made things a lot easier, but a native AE plugin would obviously be the preferred solution :P

Jake Bartlett

I used RetroDither on a lyric video, and it just got posted. Couldn't have done this without it! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fbOj2KCtbbk

Kert Gartner

Hey is there any way we could get higher downscaling rates like 16x - 32x etc? When working with 4k footage, I have to precomp my footage and downscale it to get the amount of pixelation that I need. Thanks!

George Bezerra

max Siegal

whats that song!!  well done changing it with the dithering!

Filippo Marchetti

Fantastic plugin.

Definitely worth the purchase.

Luis araujo

Is there a version for AE CC 2017?

simon bee

Hi, is there an option / a workaround to retrodither the alpha channel values, so the pixels don't smoothly fade to nothing around the edges of a layer? I'm trialling it currently and need to achieve this. Thanks

Ivan Zlobov

Hey guys, this plugin works just fine with any modern version of AE.

We would update it otherwise, but we have 0 filed issues with it at the moment. Try it for yourself, demo version is here and it just works, no strings attached.

Simon, I'm not sure I'm completely following, but if you want to dither your alpha channel, you could just extract it from alpha to any color channel (or all RGB channels at once) using effects from 'channel' folder (EG Channel Combiner or Compound Arithmetic), dither the color, and put it back into alpha with the same utilities or by using the layer as Luma matte.

Kert Gartner

Kert Gartner said:

Hey is there any way we could get higher downscaling rates like 16x - 32x etc? When working with 4k footage, I have to precomp my footage and downscale it to get the amount of pixelation that I need. Thanks!

Just want to bump this back up! Would love some more options here! Thanks!

Ivan Zlobov

Hey! How much exactly would you want? Would just extra 16x and 32x work?

Ivan Zlobov

Well, either way - adding these two for now.

Tommm Mmmmmm

tried to download the latest version to upgrade my old one - the plugin now appears as "shader bitch 2" in my effects and appears to be a demo version of "long shadow" - did you upload the right file for aescripts? love the plugin though and looking forward to get this new version to work, too.

Kert Gartner

Ivan Zlobov said:

Hey! How much exactly would you want? Would just extra 16x and 32x work?

HOLY SMOKES FINALLY!!! THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!! Been using this plugin for years and I'm so happy you've finally added this Would love 64x and 128x but 16 and 32 are a HUGE help for now thanks again!!!

Ivan Zlobov

Please reupload, sorry for that!

Tommm Mmmmmm said:

Kit Farman

Would it be possible to get a 2-bit Game Boy style palette?

Ivan Zlobov

Hmm. It's not really a palette for Gameboy, since it's just shades of gray over green. Since it's not really a color mapping but rather overall luma values we're talking about, several ways come to mind; you could use some 2-bit Retrodither palette, eg CGA, and then convert it to monochrome.

Fabricio Lima

I am really tempted to buy this plugin,.. but I am finding a lot of flickering/dark scenes... 
Not sure if this is an issue on my end, but some of the settings, there are some crazy flickering/black screens.
Are there some restrictions on some settings combinations that may cause this? 

Ivan Zlobov

Hi Fabricio,

I mean, RD has been used by many people without this issue, and it's possible to make an output screen black with certain settings combo, but your description doesn't sound right anyway.

If you haven't found a solution yet, please file a bug ticket and attach an example AE project that gives you problems, would be much appreciated!

Fabricio Lima said:

I am really tempted to buy this plugin,.. but I am finding a lot of flickering/dark scenes... 
Not sure if this is an issue on my end, but some of the settings, there are some crazy flickering/black screens.
Are there some restrictions on some settings combinations that may cause this? 

Fabricio Lima

Ivan Zlobov said:

Hi Fabricio,

I mean, RD has been used by many people without this issue, and it's possible to make an output screen black with certain settings combo, but your description doesn't sound right anyway.

If you haven't found a solution yet, please file a bug ticket and attach an example AE project that gives you problems, would be much appreciated!

Fabricio Lima said:

I am really tempted to buy this plugin,.. but I am finding a lot of flickering/dark scenes... 
Not sure if this is an issue on my end, but some of the settings, there are some crazy flickering/black screens.
Are there some restrictions on some settings combinations that may cause this? 

I appreciate the speed on your response! It is for sure an issue on my machine. I am using two GTX 1080 on SLI... and it flickers a lot. But trying on my macbook, it runs perfect  
Not sure if there could be a trick to change where the plugin runs from, but I will buy it anyway.
Thanks for the response! 

Sean Adams

Awesome plugin but every time I add it to my clip a purple "X" appears across the whole thing that is still there when I export. Using it with PP 2020 so maybe that is the issue?

Lloyd Alvarez

Sean Adams said:

Awesome plugin but every time I add it to my clip a purple "X" appears across the whole thing that is still there when I export. Using it with PP 2020 so maybe that is the issue?

Please see our FAQ on registering your plugins: https://aescripts.com/knowledgebase/index/view/faq/how-to-register-plugins/ 

If you still need assistance, please open a support ticket https://aescripts.com/contact/?direct=1

David Koss

Really stuck here. I get mostly random black frames after registering. 2018 and 2019. Tried everything to make this work. Plugin works about 1% of the time.

Ivan Zlobov

Ok, so we've recently had two similar looking issues from people who run multiGPU/multi monitor setups having black output from the plugin in later  versions of AE.
I feel that it would be a problem not only for RD but rather for any OpenGL-accelerated plugin; so, if you have similar issue, try to force your system to use one particular OpenGL rendering GPU for AE. (Nvidia Control Panel -> Manage 3D settings -> Program Settings -> Adobe After Effects -> [some gpu card, better the one that you have your monitor attached to].
Thanks to David and Fabricio for caring to file bugs and helping to work this around!

James Houston

I've just installed on Mac (AE 2019) and I'm experiencing a problem: Retrodither shows 4 versions of my composition in a row (squashed on the x axis)

Has anyone had this problem before? 

Thanks

James

James Houston

Here's pics that describe the problem above. For some reason there are 4 diamonds instead of one.