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Club effect

Sodium Strobe

Sodium Strobe is a club lighting look in FRCTL, the browser VJ studio. Hot sodium amber over scarlet, topped with lemon flare.

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 Sodium Strobe free All effects

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

The eye-in-triangle recoloured in rust, amber and lemon yellow — Sodium Strobe, default settings

What Sodium Strobe does

A single warm hue family: shadows go scarlet, mids amber and the brightest tones lemon, like a street under sodium lamps. Hot spreads the lemon flare through more of the highlights, and Lift brightens each pixel by its strongest channel, so a saturated red lifts as much as white does. Despite the name it doesn't flash, so strobe has to come from modulation.

Using Sodium Strobe

Where it works: Warm cover art and industrial or tunnel-rave visuals, where monochrome amber reads as streetlight. It also pulls mismatched clips into one colour so footage from different cameras cuts together.
With the music: For the strobe the name promises, put a beat-triggered Envelope with a short decay on Blend so the grade slams in on each hit. B1 (kick) on Hot then blows out the lemon on the kick.
Starting point: Blend centre, Hot centre, Lift centre, then take Hot toward three-quarters for a lemon-heavy frame.

Controls

Blend: Strength of the filter vs source.
Hot: Lemon flare wash on the highlights.
Lift: Channel peak lift shaping.

Pairs well with Sodium Strobe