What's new

Sorry I haven't been as active on this project lately. I've been working on other things for the past several months, but I've still found time to add a few features and fix some bugs.

Folders for presets

The preset manager now properly displays folders:

More optimization

I've been optimizing various parts of ntsc-rs for the past few months, and the effect should now be 30-35% faster!

Video rendering speed won't speed up by that much, because the bottleneck there is in video encoding. However, the live preview should be a lot faster.

As always, the best way to improve performance and faithful 1990s accuracy is to resize your videos to 480p.

Check for updates

In the "Help" menu, you can now check for updates from within ntsc-rs itself!

This is not an auto-updater. ntsc-rs will never connect to the internet by itself or "phone home", and will only make a network request if you click "check for updates".

Web version!

This is where much of the development effort has been going. Many people have asked for a version of ntsc-rs that runs on mobile devices and web browsers, and cutting-edge web APIs now make it possible!

There are many limitations compared to the desktop version, but it's great if you're using a mobile device or Chromebook. Try it out now!

For installation instructions and further guidance, see the Getting Started guide on the ntsc-rs website.

What's new

• Fixed ntsc-rs no longer working on recent versions of Adobe Premiere and After Effects on macOS (#308). I owe a massive thank you to @mobile-bungalow for debugging and fixing this issue!

  The fix should work, but leave a comment on that issue if you're still having trouble getting ntsc-rs to show up in Premiere or After Effects on macOS.

• Fixed crashes in the OpenFX plugin caused by missing error checks. This affected Nuke and possibly other editing software as well.

For installation instructions and further guidance, see the Getting Started guide on the ntsc-rs website.

This has been tested and confirmed to fix crashes when using the OpenFX plugin in Nuke.

This release may fix issues with the After Effects/Premiere plugin not working on some newer versions of AE and Premiere on macOS, and with the OpenFX plugin crashing in Nuke.

What's new

PNG sequence support

The GUI and command-line application now support rendering PNG sequences. You can include a string of # characters in your filename to determine where the sequence number goes.

The CLI also supports rendering just a single frame as a PNG. (#223)

Scaling the effect itself

There is now an option (at the bottom, near "Bandwidth scale") to adjust the vertical scale of the effect as well. There's also an option to automatically scale the effect to the video resolution, but it's disabled by default because it really works much better if you scale the video down to 480p, like real VHS tapes are.

The effect is also now automatically scaled along with the preview resolution in After Effects and OpenFX hosts. (#229)

Bug fixes

• Fixed drag-and-drop events on Windows. (#287)
• CJK (Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) text now shows up in the UI. (#276)
  • The text still may not appear completely correct (Korean in particular), but that's due to the way the user interface framework renders fonts. Fixing that is a much longer-term project.
• WebP images can now be loaded on Windows and macOS. (#271)

For installation instructions and further guidance, see the Getting Started guide on the ntsc-rs website.

What's new

Performance improvements

• ntsc-rs no longer uses hyperthreading, because it seems to actually make things slower. Disabling hyperthreading improves performance by at least 25%.
• Optimized the code a bit more, for an additional speed boost.
• Fixed a performance bug on ARM processors (such as Apple Silicon). Users with an Apple Silicon device should also see a ~25% speed boost.

I measured an end-to-end performance improvement of 40% when compared to v0.9.0 on a Ryzen 7 7700X.

More

• Added support for loading ntscQT presets.
• Fix dot crawl on interlaced videos (#241). Thanks, @rgm89git!
• Render jobs' ETA is now displayed in hours, minutes, and seconds. It's also calculated more accurately.
• If the standalone application doesn't support a certain media format, it'll now tell you which format specifically.
• When loading old presets in new versions of ntsc-rs, it now uses the default settings from when they were created, making them appear the way they did at creation time.

For installation instructions and further guidance, see the Getting Started guide on the ntsc-rs website.

What's new

Loading and saving presets from the plugins

This feature has been long requested. The plugins' usability was significantly hampered by having to manually tweak all the sliders yourself. No more--you can now take advantage of the wide array of presets that the ntsc-rs community has assembled!

Drag-and-drop support

You can now drag and drop media and presets directly into ntsc-rs to load them, and even install presets by dropping them over the presets manager!

Command-line interface

You can now use ntsc-rs directly from the command line, allowing you to do things like automate it via shell scripts! See the documentation to get started.

Smoother scaling

You can now select which filtering method to use when rescaling videos in the standalone application. This is especially helpful for scaling videos down to under half their original size, where the default method (while faster) can look rather pixelated. Look at the wires and tree leaves in the video below to see the difference:

Since the new menu takes up more screen real estate, the scale control has been moved to the left pane, just above the effect settings. It's still independent from settings presets.

Persistent settings

While the effect settings were previously saved in the standalone app, the scaling and render settings were not, and had to be manually set every time you used the application. Now they're saved just like the effect settings!

More fixes

• Fixed a long-standing bug where videos with variable framerates were mistakenly considered still images (#8; 4ef10b0)
• Fixed the plugin not loading specifically in After Effects 2020 (#214; 6ca8272)
• Fixed compatibility with older Linux versions (#215; 75fa46e)
• File pickers now block interaction with the main window on Windows (#88; 1ad00cb)
• Scrolling in the timeline widget is no longer unreasonably slow (62f1407)
• Fixed a crash in After Effects when applying ntsc-rs to an adjustment layer with nothing beneath it (#220; ee32e2c)
• Disabled Nvidia-specific hardware video decoding because it is flaky and results in random errors when loading videos (6599522)

For installation instructions and further guidance, see the Getting Started guide on the ntsc-rs website.

What's new

• Added an error dialog which should appear before most Windows standalone application crashes, allowing for easier error diagnosis
• Updated the GUI library used in the standalone application, which should result in crisper graphics
• Added the ability to pause and resume render jobs
• Moved the "Bandwidth scale" slider to the bottom, since it should be one of the last things that people adjust, not the first
• Updated the video preview to use the correct aspect ratio for videos with non-square pixels
• Improved the video preview's zoom. Nearest-neighbor scaling is now used only for 2x zoom and above
• Fixed a crash when scaling the input media to 1 row
• Fixed a crash in the standalone application when entering negative numbers into sliders' textboxes
• Fixed the After Effects/Premiere plugin not working in Premiere on macOS

For installation instructions and further guidance, see the Getting Started guide on the ntsc-rs website.

What's new

macOS support

ntsc-rs finally supports macOS! Thank you to all the macOS users who helped test things out. This was my first time developing anything for macOS, so it took quite a while to learn the quirks of the platform--I've been working on this for the past couple of months, and I appreciate your patience.

Preset manager

You can now save and load settings presets directly in the app itself via the new preset manager panel! This should streamline the process of switching between different presets.

Currently, the application doesn't come with any presets. I'll continue to look into the best way to bundle them--I don't want users to end up accidentally deleting and overwriting the default presets and not knowing how to get them back, but I also don't want to annoy them with hardcoded presets that they don't find useful and can't hide or remove.

New default settings

The default settings haven't been updated since the very first version of ntsc-rs. I've updated them to something that should look more accurate out of the box.

Rewritten After Effects plugin

The After Effects/Premiere plugin has been completely rewritten! The original version was written in C and was difficult to maintain. It saw a huge number of bugs and regressions.

The new version of the After Effects plugin is written completely in Rust, thanks to Rust bindings to the After Effects API that weren't available when I first wrote the plugin. It should now be much easier not just to maintain, but to build as well! Building C projects across multiple platforms is already challenging, and the After Effects SDK requires some bespoke build tools. The Rust bindings handle that part as well!

As a user of the plugin, you shouldn't notice any differences in functionality (although I did fix a crash since the last release). If you run into any new bugs, feel free to open an issue, preferably including instructions for reproducing the bug or even an After Effects project file that demonstrates it.

Other

• A loading spinner now appears while the video preview is loading
• You can now adjust the application's zoom level in the "View" menu
• The volume slider now actually mutes the audio when set at 0%
• The filename of the loaded video is now displayed in the window's title
• Fixed a bug where the "snow" effect was less dense near the left edge of the video
• Some code in the OpenFX plugin has been cleaned up as well. Open an issue if you run into any new bugs

For installation instructions and further guidance, see the Getting Started guide on the ntsc-rs website.

What's new

• Telecined videos now render properly with the "Interleaved output" option enabled