I toyed with both, Cathode on the Mac as well as Cool-retro-term on Linux, for video production. The effect and quality is exactly what I want. My only pain is that they both don't fit well into my workflow.
Does anyone know a plugin for Blender or Natron that can produce a high quality realistic CRT effect?
Preferably with similar flexibility and parameters as Cathode or Cool-retro-term.
All the plugins I found were very limited and most of them didn't even attempt to look realistic. For me quality and realism are key, convenient use in a compositor is also important. I don't care about rendering times.
Things I found during my research that look useful and cool but also don't quite fit into a more traditional compositor workflow:
* CRT-Royale [1] is a GPU based real-time CRT shader that seems to go into ridiculous detail.
* FFmpeg CRT Transform [2] is a purely FFmpeg based CRT effect.
I'm glad to see you're interested in quality and authenticity in your video productions. A lot of major Hollywood studios just don't give a crap, and composite some green text in Courier or Consolas onto a prop.
Cool-retro-term is open source, and jwz wrote some modules (like apple2) for xscreensaver that also have a detailed CRT simulation. So maybe mine that code for techniques to include in a blender module?
If you can use Adobe Premiere plugins through some means there's a ton of retro & VCR style plugins in their world. Most are commercial but not super expensive. I've used this one and liked it a lot: https://www.maxon.net/en/red-giant-complete/universe/vhs There are lots of knobs to tweak and you could definitely get something that's more like cool retro term.
> Does anyone know a plugin for Blender or Natron that can produce a high quality realistic CRT effect?
Sounds like a pretty niche scratch-an-itch thing for somebody to write. If you know Python the Blender Python API isn't that hard to learn, although it does tend to change sometimes, especially between major versions, and sometimes minor versions as well.
I feel like you could get some real nice CRT effects in blender by messing with shader nodes. I doubt a plugin would add much to that workflow that's not there already natively.
There was a similar program called Cathode for macos.
The effects were cool (including the ability to change the bitrate of the terminal, made me understand why ed would make sense even aside from the other resource constraints, even `cat` takes ages at low speeds). There were also a bunch of included sounds like hardware boots (relay clicks, fan ramp up, etc…)
But the neatest thing is is that IIRC its “DRM scheme” was that the display would slowly degrade if you didn’t have a paid license. You could also degauss it (though I don’t think it would fix the degradation, you had to reboot for that). Obviously if you liked the degradation effect you could keep it even with a paid license.
Oh! I forgot all about Cathode but I used to love it, especially during the peak skeuomorphic Mac OS X era (tho I think it was then called OS X but I can’t remember what year Cathode was released, just that it worked on Lion). I forgot about the DRM thing too, but I was aware of it, and again, such a peak skeuomorphic vibe.
I’ve had cool-retro-term in my GitHub stars for years but I think I only used it on Linux. I’ll defUnitedHealth need to spin-up the latest release on macOS to reminisce about the glory days of software emulating software some of us don’t really remember (so I’m now legitimately nostalgic for the nostalgia-ware of a time I don’t actually remember).
For Windows folks, Windows Terminal has a similar effect available. Definitely nostalgic, definitely fun for a minute, definitely not how I would want to work in the terminal.
Steps to try the feature out:
Open/Switch to Windows Terminal
Control-, [Control-<comma>] to open Settings
Pick any profile from the side bar
Click Appearance tab
Toggle "Retro terminal effects" located below the font options
It depends. I could see myself using this for niche applications such as visually marking certain terminals.
When you work on multiple remote hosts, it's common practice to use different profiles to visually identify hosts. Say your local machine has your standard and preferred colorscheme but staging machines have a green background and customer-facing machines have a red background. Indeed, it's a manual process but I've seen people use it in most places where a substantial amount of work is done on remote hosts (I still use it today if/when I need to access remote hosts).
It's happen to all of us frankly. Now I also keep the default shell on remote machines. I guess it's a cognitive trick where I feel uneasy at the different prompt and key bindings (I use zsh with bindkey -v locally).
Screen burn. Leave it on for a few months displaying the same stuff
and get a grey burned in shadow forever showing 'Login:' at the top
left of your terminal.
Gauss distortion: Bring a strong magnet close to your terminal to have
all the letters suck to one side and stay there for days.
TEMPEST fun: Broadcast the contents of your badly shielded screen to
another badly shielded screen in the same room (yes that's real and
something I've actually seen).
My brother (late 30s) is the same, he's still bothered by anti-teenager and anti-bat repellent gadgets, too. Cracks me up every time. And he listens to more metal and attends more shows than I do, too.
Those repellents bother my kids as well, and they're everywhere apparently but I can't hear them. Permanent tinnitus from far too many loud concerts in my 20s and 30s. All I can say to younger readers is: wear earplugs. You won't appreciate not having tinnitus until you do, then it's permanent :/
I know this is just a toy, but the curvature and saturation are massively exaggerated from what using these terminals was really like. This is really hard to look at for more than a couple seconds. In reality, the old VTxx terminals were much easier on the eyes, particularly the amber ones.
If you right click then you can go to Settings and reduce the curvature and tweak all of the effects levels. I hated it originally also but after turning a few things down and a few other things up (advanced tab "quality") it is much better.
Yes, the Windows terminal effects overdo that too. Sure there was a little blur, but nowhere near as smeary as they make it look (unless you had buttered your monitor or something).
Monitors back then were much lower resolution, so the blur was subpixel. And monochrome monitors or black and white TVs (one part per pixel) were much sharper and clearer than standard color monitors or color TVs (three parts per pixel). There should be almost no noticeable blur if emulating those.
Increasing font size to 16 and decreasing font weight to 'light' helps a bit to get it more realistic, as long as you keep the terminal window at about 80x25.
This is very hard for me to confirm: I don't have any crt close by and the crt's which I used more (late 90's) were already mostly plane.
But I remember big crt tv's. Some of the biggest one's, had a form of "inverse" curvature to mimic plane panels of the time. I clearly remember one whose curvature was not constant over the screen and panning scenes had a weird effect of enhancing its deformities. So, I still think he is wrong even on this second case.
However, it's probably not as extreme as what this does, and when you're sitting in front of it (the photo is at an angle) I don't notice much text distortion.
the curvature and saturation are massively exaggerated from what using these terminals was really like
Depends on how much your company wanted to spend on terminals.
I worked for a chemical company where we had hand-me-down Wangs from a different division that looked very much like these.
This is really hard to look at for more than a couple seconds.
Perhaps speak to your optometrist. When I was back in the office, I used this all day long on a 27-inch monitor with no problem. And I'm a graybeard.
the old VTxx terminals were much easier on the eyes, particularly the amber ones
I remember the amber terminals being marketed as easier on the eyes than the white or green ones I used, but I have no first-hand experience with amber.
I used amber monitors briefly and they were neat because they were different but I don’t recall ever seeing a study justifying the “easier on the eyes” claim.
Agreed. I would really dig this if it was a bit more realistic. I really miss amber monochrome and have had it at the back of my mind to build some css themes to mimick the old monochrome screens for years.
I did too -- a mix of VT101's, IBM 3270's, VT-220's. Most of the VT-220's were green, but we had a few amber ones, which I preferred over green (it felt like such leading edge tech for some reason). We had a few demo units with a white phosphor, and they were amazing - you could use an escape sequence to turn on reverse video and tell yourself it was just like reading a piece of paper (it was not).
I have a bit of nostalgia for those screens but wouldn't want to use one for more than a few minutes. But would love to have an old DEC VT-220 keyboard!
The compilation instructions for ubuntu do not currently work. Apparently, you need to add qtquickcontrols2-5-dev to the list of dependencies. But then at runtime you get this error:
QQmlApplicationEngine failed to load component
qrc:/main.qml:67 Type OSXMenu unavailable
qrc:/menus/OSXMenu.qml:22 module "Qt.labs.platform" is not installed
Cannot load QML interface
I’ve been tempted recently to drop this on a pi and hook it up to an old oled I have sitting around (that has minor burnin) for status-monitory things. One cool side effect is that because it’s always shifting pixels, it won’t cause further burnin. No, the irony is not lost on me and I love it.
The scanline was a bit strong. But I am glad it doesn't come with the high pitched whine of the flyback. My adm5 is .. unbearable to turn on these days.
Maybe I only worked in universities which bought high-end VT52/100 and clones. The curvature felt a bit overdone.
Just FYI: it has context menus. So, if you have tmux to autostart when you open your fish shell, you will get a special tmux context menu on right-click instead of the Cool-Retro-Term menu that lets you edit your settings.
There is also a font called vt220 somewhere out there that gives you the look and feel of the gorgeous DEC VT 220 terminals. If I can find it I'll post the link here
There's one called DEC Terminal Modern that may work better with cool-retro-term. It's a vector font that doesn't have the scanlines in the font, so won't clash with the scanline effects the terminal emulator provides.
aaaaand will that enlarge the image if the overall brightness-of-all-pixels on screen gets higher (either by turning the knob, or, you know, type lots of text
) ?
Does anyone know a plugin for Blender or Natron that can produce a high quality realistic CRT effect?
Preferably with similar flexibility and parameters as Cathode or Cool-retro-term.
All the plugins I found were very limited and most of them didn't even attempt to look realistic. For me quality and realism are key, convenient use in a compositor is also important. I don't care about rendering times.
Things I found during my research that look useful and cool but also don't quite fit into a more traditional compositor workflow:
* CRT-Royale [1] is a GPU based real-time CRT shader that seems to go into ridiculous detail.
* FFmpeg CRT Transform [2] is a purely FFmpeg based CRT effect.
[1] https://docs.libretro.com/shader/crt_royale/
[2] https://github.com/viler-int10h/FFmpeg-CRT-transform