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Glitch effect

Pixel Sort

Pixel Sort is a glitch video effect in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Brightness-triggered streaks like a datamoshed scanner.

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 Pixel Sort free All effects

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

The eye-in-triangle with its pale areas broken into fine horizontal streaks of scattered coloured pixels — Pixel Sort, default settings

What Pixel Sort does

Pixels brighter than a gate get shoved along thin lanes, each lane by its own random distance, with a red and blue fringe on whatever moves. Dark linework stays put, so the pale areas break into fine hatched static. Streak sets the distance, Threshold the width of the brightness gate, Chroma the fringe, and Direction turns the lanes to Columns or Rings.

Using Pixel Sort

Where it works: Stills and cover art where the bright areas should look corrupted but the drawing has to survive. All three channels travel together along one axis, so it reads as a scanner fault rather than a colour split.
With the music: Static until something moves it. B6 (upper mids) on Streak lets vocals and leads stretch the lanes, and a beat-triggered Envelope on Chroma splits the streaks' colour on every hit.
Starting point: Threshold at centre, Streak at three-quarters, Chroma at a quarter, Direction on Rows.

Controls

Threshold: Brightness gate width for streaking.
Streak: Horizontal displacement of sorted streaks.
Chroma: RGB fringe on streaked samples.
Direction: Which way the streaks are cut, and which way they smear.

Pairs well with Pixel Sort