Make a video look like VHS without ruining it.

First, what a VCR actually did to a picture

Most "VHS filters" are a guess at the look: some grain, a colour shift, a few lines. The real thing was a stack of specific failures, each with a cause, and the look only reads as true when the failures are the right ones. Here is what a home tape was doing to your afternoon.

• It was soft, sideways more than up and down. A VHS deck could only record so much detail per line of picture, roughly 240 lines' worth across a frame that television was drawing at over 400. Vertical detail survived better than horizontal, which is why tape faces look kind and tape text looks unreadable.
• The colour was recorded separately, and worse. VHS stored colour at a fraction of the detail it stored brightness, at a lower frequency on the same track. Colour bled past its edges and smeared behind anything red or saturated. That is the single most recognisable thing about the format.
• It was 4:3. The television shape of the whole century. Everything filmed on a camcorder was composed for it, and a widescreen picture in a 4:3 treatment is the middle of itself with the sides gone.
• The bottom of the frame was noise. Two video heads took turns reading the tape, and the hand-over happened at the bottom of every frame, leaving a tearing band a few lines tall. Old televisions hid it behind the bezel. Flat screens show it, which is why transfers of old tapes have that strip.
• It wobbled. Tape stretches, spools drag, heads drift, and a consumer deck had no way to correct for any of it. The picture swayed a fraction of a line here and there, and lost its grip on a cut, a pause, or a bad splice, then found it again.
• It dropped out. A speck of dust or a worn patch of oxide, and for one frame a bright horizontal streak flashed across the picture. On a well-used tape, a few a minute.
• Every copy got worse. A tape of a tape lost detail and gained noise. A tape of a tape of a tape is what most of us remember, and it is why the look feels more distant than the years alone explain.

The point of the list: grain alone is not VHS. Colour bleed, a 4:3 frame, a band along the bottom and a picture that loses its footing on every cut are, and if a treatment does those, it reads as a tape even to someone who has never held one. The history of the family camcorder is where the machines behind all this came from.

The three ways to get the look on an iPhone

They differ on one question more than any other: where does the look live? In the file, or in the playback. Decide that first and the rest is detail.

1. Shoot with a retro camera app

These apps replace the Camera app and record with the look already applied: the grain, the date stamp, sometimes a fake viewfinder. It is the fastest route and often the most convincing, because the look is designed into the capture.

The cost is permanent. The clean version of that afternoon never existed. If the treatment is heavy, or the fashion for it passes, or a child in the frame turns thirty and wants to see their own face, there is nothing underneath to go back to. These apps also tend to produce vertical, small, single-phone clips, which is fine for a post and less good for a keepsake. Right choice when: the look is the point and the clip is for now.

2. Add a VHS effect in an editor

Apps like iMovie and CapCut, and most desktop editors, can lay a VHS or camcorder effect over footage after the fact and export a new file. Your original is kept. You choose how strong the effect is. You can post the result anywhere.

The cost is work and a second copy. Somebody has to gather everyone's clips first, build the edit, pick the effect, and export, and the result is a re-encode of a re-encode. Do it for a wedding video and it looks like a wedding video with a filter on it, because that is what it is. Right choice when: you want a file with the look baked in, and you were going to edit anyway.

3. Put the look on a playback switch

This is what VideoBro does, and it is the only one of the three where the answer to "where does the look live" is nowhere. Everyone films with the iPhone's own Camera app into one shared tape. Develop turns the tape into one clean widescreen film. Then VHS mode, a switch under Playback in your Profile and on the browser player's front panel, plays any tape or film through a real analog treatment, the 4:3 crop and the colour bleed and the band along the bottom and the wobble on every cut, and leaves the file exactly as it was. Turn it off and it never happened.

The cost is that you can't export the treated version. A download from VideoBro is the clean film, always, and if you want a VHS-looking file to post, that is job number two above. Right choice when: the footage is the keepsake, more than one person shot it, and the look is something to enjoy rather than something to commit to.

How to film so the look works

Whichever route you take, the treatment can only work with what you give it. A few habits make phone footage sit naturally inside the look instead of fighting it.

• Hold the phone sideways. Tape was 4:3, which is a landscape shape. Vertical video in a VHS treatment looks like a phone in a costume. (In VideoBro it is also the only kind a tape accepts.)
• Keep the subject near the middle. A 4:3 treatment crops the sides of a widescreen frame. Whoever is at the edge of the shot is about to leave it.
• Let the takes run. Tape rewards duration. A camcorder clip was thirty seconds of somebody laying a table, not a four-second cut. Film the ordinary stretch and the look does the rest. There is more on this in what to film.
• Don't chase sharpness. Steady is good. Tripod-still is wrong. A hand-held wander is what the format was built around.
• Warm light beats bright light. Kitchen light, lamp light, the hour before dinner. Tape was at its best indoors, in the evening, with people in it.
• Skip the fake date stamp. The burnt-in orange date is the one part of the look that is pure costume, and it lies about when the thing happened. If the ordering matters, use something that keeps it honestly: a VideoBro tape stamps every clip with the real time it was shot and plays them in that order.
• Get more than one phone on it. The camcorder got passed around. That is the part of the memory people actually miss, and it has nothing to do with the picture. Shared tapes are built for exactly this.

If you're using VideoBro, it goes like this

1. 1

   Start a tape

   Tap New Tape and name it for the occasion. Invite the people who'll be there with Collab: up to 8 people including you, on every plan.

2. 2

   Tap ARM and film like normal

   Tap ARM at the top of the screen, then film with the iPhone Camera app, held sideways. Every horizontal clip you shoot lands on the tape by itself. For anything already on a phone, tap + on the clip list and pick it.

3. 3

   Turn on VHS mode

   Tap your profile picture, find Playback, and switch on VHS mode. The Active Tape's preview goes 4:3 and soft, a VCR counter appears, and you can watch the day take shape as if it were on a cassette.

4. 4

   Develop, then watch it either way

   Anyone on the tape with an account taps Develop. The finished film lands in everyone's Tape Cabinet as one clean widescreen file. Watch it plain, or flip the switch. The film doesn't change, and neither does the download.

Everything above is on the free plan: 2 GB of space, about an hour of footage, and no part of the look is something you pay for. The full walkthrough covers the rest of the app.