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Glitch effect

Chromatic Sorting

Chromatic Sorting is a glitch video effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Pseudo-sorts red horizontally and blue vertically from brightness gates.

Runs live on video, images, a camera or generated art. Stack it with any other effect, and route LFOs, envelopes or any of ten audio bands to its controls so it moves with the music.

Try Chromatic Sorting free All effects

The untouched demo art: an eye inside a triangle over wavy teal, blue and peach lines — Source

The eye-in-triangle tinted teal-green with magenta and blue channel ghosts streaked across it — Chromatic Sorting, default settings

What Chromatic Sorting does

Pushes red along the chosen heading and blue at right angles to it, each gated by brightness: red moves out of the highlights, blue out of the shadows, and green drifts slightly. Thin hash bands vary each gate, so red and blue land as crossed stripes and the art goes teal-green with magenta and blue ghosts. Shift sets the distance, Bands the stripe count.

Using Chromatic Sorting

Where it works: Colour-separation looks on stills and logo plates, where two channels crossing at right angles give a woven, misregistered finish that Pixel Sort's single axis can't. No clock, so it renders one fixed frame for an export.
With the music: A BPM-synced LFO on Shift sweeps the channels out and back each bar, and B1 (kick) on Bands reshuffles the stripes on every kick.
Starting point: Bands at centre, Shift at a quarter, Blend at three-quarters, Direction on Right.

Controls

Bands: Row/column hash band frequency.
Shift: Horizontal/vertical channel shift strength.
Blend: Blend strength toward the sorted sample.
Direction: Which way red sorts. Blue always takes the perpendicular.

Pairs well with Chromatic Sorting