PXL-2000 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Oddly, simulating the PXL's simple hybrid design turns out to be quite difficult. Indeed, getting the cassette deck distortion just right has proven to be an extremely complex problem. One can, however, get close to the PXL's oddly ethereal quality by putting a video sequence through a number of different processing steps. These must be carried out in this order or the effect will be quite different. * Reduce the saturation to 0. The PXL2000 is a monochrome camera. * Reduce the frame rate to 15 frames per second. Deinterlace the video; the PXL does not interlace. * Reduce the resolution to 120 pixels by 90 pixels. * Apply a Gaussian blur function with a radius of about one and a half pixels. This mimics the lowpass filter. * Sharpen the image slightly (about 30%). * Clamp the black point to about 5% and the white point to about 95%. * Compress the dynamic range of the entire image by about 1.2 to 1. * Posterize to 90 steps * Add a lag effect; this should add a small proportion of the three previous frames to each frame, giving slight trails and motion artifacting * Add whichever video modulator simulation effect you prefer, plus some scanlines (since PXL is not interlaced) * Clamp the white and black points again * Apply a second Gaussian blur with the same radius * Add a black border around the image to push the edges of the image into the title safe area. (The image area is exactly 75% of a full 720 x 540 NTSC frame, or 540 x 405.)The result of this process should resemble PXL2000 video.
Thanks Nathan!