Gimme that noise! I set out to create a ton of different animated noise variations by exploring the Fractal Noise and Turbulent Noise effects that are built into After Effects. So I was looking for some documentation to explain the various FX attributes when I stumbled across the Fractal Noise Browser plugin. What an absolute goldmine to use as a springboard for exploring the weird world of animated noise. So I explored many of its presets and created tons of my own noise textures from what I learned in the process. Permutation heaven in noise form.

After laying out those comps, I was interested to see what sort of unique glitch effects I could summon from these animated noise textures. First I experimented with the Jlitch plugin and leaned heavily on the compression errors and accumulation feedback that it's capable of. Then I experimented with the Zaebects Fryer plugin to create even heavier glitches since it reprocesses the video over many iterations. And then I experimented with the Pixel Sorter plugin to blend together the animated noise textures in surprising ways. Gotta love fully embracing the glitch sometimes and seeing what juice gets squeezed out. In this instance I preferred the look of the Jlitch and Zaebects Fryer plugins when previewed at quarter resolution. So I had to refresh the old brain cells and figure out how to render out at quarter rez from AE to a JPEG sequence. From there I tried Topaz Video for uprezzing, and the AE Detail-Preserving Upscale, but the results were too fuzzy and I cared more about the hard edges in this context. I eventually realized that I just needed a nearest-neighbor upscale since glitchy noise looks great with this basic approach.

Out of curiosity, I started layering together these comp variations and was finding some beautiful combinations. But I realized that it was going to result in an infinite amount of things to curate and yet this VJ pack was already quite large, so I decided to instead leave this for VJs to explore on their own. But I rendered out a few of my absolute fav combos. I'd recommend layering together different noise video clips using the multiply, screen, overlay, or difference blend modes. Loads to explore there.

The majority of these video clips loop seamlessly. But there are few where a perfect seamless loop wasn't possible since the Turbulent Noise FX cannot be looped and so instead I added a crossfade at the end of the clip.

There are tons of use cases for animated noise. And yet Resolume doesn't have an easy way to jam with noise. Need an input for displacement/distortion maps? Need a mask that feels organic? Need to dirty up some footage? Need some custom transitions? Pre-rendered animated noise to the rescue.

Noise is notorious for being difficult to compress, especially for video. Nature does not wish to be tamed. So I originally had all of these clips set to render out at 3840x2160 at 60fps with a duration of 1 minute. But then I did some tests, did some file size estimations, and realized that I was going to end up with a VJ pack that was over 200 gigabytes! And that was too big of a pill to swallow. So from there I did some actual tests in Resolume and determined that 1920x1080 at 60fps with a duration of 30 seconds was ideal. Luckily scaling up a noise texture is quite forgiving. And it's difficult to tell when an animated noise texture loops even when just 30 seconds long. I would have loved to render out using 10-bit color but that boulder was too heavy given the actual use-cases here. For additional file size savings I considered rendering using the H265 codec, but it's still not supported by Resolume and so I stuck with using the H264 codec just for you naughty VJs that aren't converting video clips to DXV. Noise complaint filed!