Signal Loss Effect
Signal loss effect for video and images: the feed drops out in bands of snow or black while the rest tears sideways. Seeded, so each dropout replays exactly.
What does signal loss look like?
A dropout is the signal going missing for a moment. Analog pictures usually sink slowly into noise. Digital ones fail all at once (that's called the cliff effect) and break up into blocks, freeze or go blank.
This effect slices the picture into horizontal bands and knocks out a few of them at a time. The lost bands turn to snow or black, and the ones hanging on slip sideways and lose their color, like a feed right at the edge of reception.
How to make a video cut out
Dropout controls how much of the picture gets hit at once, and Rate is how many times a second the damage jumps around. Band height is the height of each band, so the default of 48 splits the frame into roughly 22 bands.
Tear is how far a damaged band slides to the side. Static fills the lost bands with snow; set it to 0 and they go black instead. Colour loss pulls the color out of torn bands.
Weak gives an occasional flicker. Dead channel covers most of the frame in snow, Tearing throws thin bands way off to the side, and Blackouts drops tall bands to black with no tearing. For the analog version, where the picture rolls and warps, use Bad TV Effect. Glitch Effect breaks rectangles rather than bands that run the full width.
Settings for a stream hiccup, a CCTV blackout, a broadcast breakup and a beat-synced cut
Stream hiccup: Weak (Dropout 0.15, Tear 16, Static 0.4) with Rate 6. Roughly one band in seven tears and hardly any drop out, which looks like a video call stuttering on bad wifi.
CCTV blackout: Blackouts (Dropout 0.7, Band height 160, Static 0) cuts about half of its six or seven bands to black at any moment. Broadcast breakup: Tearing (Band height 14, Tear 200, Rate 14) rips the frame into thin strips.
On the beat: Rate only moves in whole steps. At 120 BPM, Rate 2 changes the damage once per beat and Rate 4 does it twice; with most other tempos it'll drift out of sync.
Is the signal loss the same on every export?
It is. The Seed decides which bands fail at every moment, so identical settings give identical dropouts frame by frame. Change the Seed and you'll get a different run.
Why do low Dropout settings tear more than they black out?
Every band gets two rolls. It tears with a chance equal to Dropout, and it drops out completely with that chance squared. So at 0.4 you're looking at 40 and 16 percent, and at 0.15 it's 15 and about 2. Low settings mostly tear; high settings mostly lose the picture.
If you want bands to vanish without the others tearing, put Tear at 0. That's what Blackouts does.
Saving a dropout
Stills show the effect's first tick, so in a saved still only the Seed decides which bands fail.
Black bands compress to almost nothing, but snow is expensive. Static 0 keeps a GIF or MP4 small, while a full Dead channel needs High quality to keep its grain. For a clean loop, make Rate times the loop's length come out to a whole number.