Scene filters
Also searched as: filters, vhs filter, crt screen, halftone print, camera lens effect, screen treatments
Canonical Definition
A scene filter is an overarching post-processing treatment — such as CRT scanlines, VHS tracking errors, halftone stippling, or lens aberration — applied across a completed composition.
Continuous throughout scene duration
Continuous frame-based phase loops
Scene filters establish aesthetic context and material reality. Rather than altering individual elements, a filter wraps the entire frame in a consistent visual texture, signaling retro analog broadcast, security camera surveillance, or print reproduction.
In Remotion, scene filters wrap arbitrary React children, allowing high-performance CSS blend modes and SVG filter pipelines to process the output.
Dither Passes & Screen Distortions
Transforming photographic footage into retro computer graphics
An ordered dither pass or screen warp algorithm remaps image brightness into Bayer matrices or curved cathode-ray tube glass.
How this works: A retro dither pass that quantizes colors and applies classic dot matrix patterning across footage.
- Deterministic shader or SVG color quantization
- Stylized lo-fi aesthetic for developer launch videos
- Seamless composition wrapper around any child scene
Engineering Guidelines & Common Pitfalls
Best Practices (What to do)
- Keep filter opacity between 20% and 40% when overlaying product UI to preserve readability.
- Use filters to demarcate distinct narrative voices (e.g. security footage for the problem, crisp 4K for the solution).
Common Failure Modes (What to avoid)
- Overusing intense chromatic aberration and VHS grain until the underlying UI is completely illegible.
Working catalog implementations
Typed Remotion components ready to drop into code.
Ordered Dither Pass
Bayer-matrix ordered dithering quantizes a slotted scene (rasterized once at mount): the image emerges from pure 2-tone noise to clean, or dissolves the reverse. Stateless per frame, never error diffusion.
ASCII Render Pass
A slotted scene renders as live ASCII: a canvas samples the source's luminance grid (rasterized once at mount) and draws glyphs from a density ramp charset; resolution steps coarse to fine as the piece resolves, then holds legible-fine.
On-Screen Display Effect
Grid, scanline, vignette, and sheen overlay plus a 3D-warp wrapper class that makes footage read as if playing on a physical display
Build scene filters in Animatiq
Prompt our motion agent in natural language. Get back typed Remotion React code with custom easing curves, brand palettes, and frame-accurate timing.
Related motion principles
Backgrounds & atmospheres
Animated backgrounds are ambient, looping visual surfaces — fluid mesh gradients, aurora fields, and responsive grids — that provide spatial depth behind foreground content.
Motion FundamentalsShaders & GPU procedural motion
A shader is a program running directly on the GPU that calculates color for millions of pixels in parallel every frame, enabling procedural noise, caustics, and organic distortions.
Motion & CameraEffects & VFX
Motion effects and VFX are physical, optical, or particle treatments — light sweeps, glass refraction, liquid surfaces, and explosions — that enhance realism or visual impact.