Free · runs in your browser
Real tape emulation, not just a colour preset: smeared colour, soft lines, tracking wobble, head-switching noise and a ticking camcorder date stamp, previewed on your clip and exported as MP4.
Drop a video or photo to colour gradeChoose a video or photo to grade
Opens in the studio: looks and Auto colour for a quick result, wheels, curves, masks and scopes when you want more.It opens in the studio on your phone. Nothing is uploaded.
MP4, MOV, WebM, MKV, JPG, PNG, WebP
Free · no watermark · graded on your device, never uploaded
To make a video look like VHS, soften the picture sideways, blur and smear the colour much more than the brightness, add line jitter and noise, darken every other line, and frame it 4:3. Open a clip above and the studio starts with the VHS look, which does all of that at once; the picture moves like tape because every flicker is tied to the video’s own time. The VHS & tape chip in All looks holds eight more, from the light Clean Deck to Worn Tape with dropouts and a rolling crease.
Each part of the effect has its own slider in the VHS tape section of the Creative panel, and Date stamp burns in a camcorder clock that ticks as the video plays. Everything runs in your browser and the clip never leaves your device. If you only want the faded colour of the period without tape damage, the vintage video filter is the gentler option, and the film look covers grain and halation from celluloid rather than tape.
Video guide
Chapters
Choose Open video or photo (Ctrl/Cmd+O) or drop a file on the page. The studio opens with the VHS look applied, so you see the tape effect on your own footage straight away.
The quick picks switch to the tape looks: try Camcorder 1995 for a home video with a date stamp, Rental Copy for a softer, dubbed tape or Tracking Error for a damaged one. Intensity scales the whole effect.
Open Creative and the VHS tape section: raise Colour bleed, Tracking or Tape noise, switch 4:3 frame on or off, and press New tape to move the jitter and dropouts somewhere else.
In Date stamp, set Show to Date, Time or Both, then choose the Date, Start time, Position and Colour. On-screen text adds PLAY ▶ or a blinking ● REC.
Choose Export (Ctrl/Cmd+Enter), then Export video. Every frame is rebuilt on your device with the same tape pattern you saw in the preview, and Download video saves the MP4.
VHS has a recognisable look because of how a home video recorder stored the picture. Each trait below is a consequence of the format, and each has its own control in the VHS tape section.
A VHS recorder kept roughly 240 lines of horizontal detail per picture height, against well over a thousand in a modern 1080p file. Fine texture such as hair, foliage and text blurs sideways, while vertical detail is limited by the 480 or so visible lines of the TV picture. Softness filters the brightness along each line and snaps the picture to 480 tape lines, then adds the faint bright halo that a recorder’s sharpening circuit left beside edges.
VHS records colour separately from brightness, on a low-frequency carrier with only a few hundred kilohertz of bandwidth, roughly a sixth of what brightness gets. Colour therefore spreads well past the edges of objects and trails to the right of them, which is why a red jumper on tape seems to glow beyond its outline. Colour bleed blurs the colour signal far more than the brightness and smears it rightwards with an exponential tail, the same direction as a real recorder.
The tape is read by heads on a spinning drum, and the playback switches from one head to the other a few lines before the end of each field. On a CRT that ragged band was hidden by overscan; in a digital transfer it shows as a torn, noisy strip along the bottom of the frame. Head-switching noise recreates it. When the heads don’t follow the recorded tracks precisely, lines wobble sideways, a band of noise rolls through the picture and the frame occasionally drops a line; Tracking does all three, more of each as you raise it.
Scanlines darkens every other tape line and nudges odd and even lines apart, like the two fields of an interlaced picture. Tape noise adds the horizontally stretched grain and blotchy colour noise of a weak signal. Dropouts are short white streaks where the magnetic coating was damaged or dusty, and Tape crease sends a band of distortion through the frame every few seconds, as a crinkled stretch of tape passes the heads.
Almost everything recorded on VHS was 4:3. 4:3 frame keeps the centre of your picture and puts black bars at the sides of a widescreen clip (or above and below a tall phone video). The file keeps its original shape, so it still fits the platform you post to; the effect, the noise and the date stamp all sit inside the 4:3 picture.
Many home camcorders could burn the date and time from their own clock into the recording, usually in a bottom corner in blocky white or amber characters. Date stamp draws the same kind of dot-matrix text, and because it is added before the tape effects, it bleeds, jitters and catches the noise like the rest of the picture instead of floating on top.
The stamp is one setting for the whole grade, so it stays when you try another look. Camcorder 1995 and Holiday Tape switch it on for you if it is off.
“Old home video” covers several formats, and they don’t look alike. Choosing the right one makes the result more convincing.
There’s nothing to install: the page works in Safari and Chrome on a phone, with the panels in a bar along the bottom. A phone renders every frame itself, so a long 4K clip takes a while to export; choose a smaller Size in Export for a quicker, softer file, which suits the VHS look anyway. Use Share to send the result to your photo library.
Photos open too. A VHS effect on a JPG, PNG or WebP image exports as a still with the same softness, colour bleed and date stamp, which is a quick way to make a tape-style cover image for a video.
Open it above: the studio applies the VHS look, which softens detail, smears the colour, adds tracking jitter, head-switching noise and scanlines, and frames the picture 4:3. Adjust any of them in Creative > VHS tape, then choose Export and Export video.
Yes, this one runs in Safari on an iPhone with no app and no account. Open the video from your library, pick a tape look, then Export and Share it back to Photos. Nothing is uploaded.
Open Creative, then Date stamp, and set Show to Date or Both. Type the Date and Start time you want; the clock runs from there as the video plays. Camcorder 1995 turns the stamp on for you.
Yes. Open a JPG, PNG or WebP image instead of a video, choose a tape look and export a still. The date stamp shows the start time you set, since a photo has no running clock.
Yes. Every random part of the effect, from the line jitter to the dropouts, is worked out from the video’s own time and a seed, so the export repeats the preview frame for frame. New tape picks a different seed.
The vintage filter changes colour and adds grain: faded blacks, warm or drifted colour, a vignette. The VHS filter rebuilds the picture as tape would carry it, with smeared colour, softness, tracking faults and scanlines, on top of a tape-like colour response.
Switch 4:3 frame off in Creative > VHS tape. The tape effects then cover the whole frame at its original shape.