How to Create a VHS Look in Premiere Pro (Without Plugins!)

In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to make a glitch distortion effect to give your video a VHS or early 90s TV look. No plugins are needed, I’ll be using built-in Premiere Pro effects only.

I’ll also show you how find music to bring your retro vibe to life and make it feel more authentic. I reached out to Musicbed and they sponsored this post. Thanks to Musicbed, you can get a free 30-day trial of their subscription and it will give you unlimited music that you can use with your own YouTube channel or equivalent social platform. You can also collaborate on projects, you can invite coworkers or friends to add songs and give feedback.  I’ll show you more about how to use Musicbed’s search later in this article, but for now, let’s go ahead and jump on into Premiere for the tutorial. 

Creating a 4:3 Aspect Ratio Sequence

The first step to creating our VHS RGB split effect is to go to new item to create a new sequence.Here we can use a preset that has a 4:3 aspect ratio.The DV NTSC Standard has this aspect ratio, you can see here in the details of the preset. Then hit okay.

Then take any HD video you have and place it in the 4 by 3 aspect ratio sequence and if it asks you if you want to change the sequence settings, don’t simply keep it the same. From there, go to effect controls and scale the video down to fit the frame. 

RGB Split

First, go to Effect Controls and change the blend mode to Linear Dodge Add, this blend mode will enable the RGB split after we apply color balance effects and duplicate the layers.

Now go to Effects and search for the Color Balance (RGB) effect and double click to apply it to the clip. Now, make red 100, and green and blue 0. Next, Duplicate the clip in the timeline by holding the Option key and dragging and dropping above, this time, make Red 0, and green 100. Now Duplicate the clip again to the third layer in the timeline. This time let’s change green to 0 and blue to 100.

Right now the clip looks normal, because each color is balance. But now if we select one of the layers and begin to move the position controls, this is where the split begins. Let’s select another layer and lets move the position. The more you move it the more drastic the effect will be, so you can choose how much you want. 

Adding Visual Noise

Next, let’s add some grain. First let’s create an adjustment layer and drag it on top of all three layers and the drag the end handle to meet the duration of the video. From effects search for “Noise” and drop click to apply it the adjustment layer.

From Effect controls, increase the the noise to 15 or 20% until you get the amount of grain you like. 

Creating Screen Distortion

Let’s add the animating distortion to the screen by searching for an effect called ‘wave warp’ and applying it to the clip. It looks strange at first, but let’s make some adjustments.

Change the wave type to Square, keep the wave height at 10, then let’s increase the width to about 1000. Then direction to 0 and then the wave speed let’s do -0.2, you can change this at anytime to be faster or slower. Then the Pinning, let’s pin it to all edges so we don’t get any black on the sides. 

Text on Screen

Use the type tool to type out PLAY and the date and time in the lower left. I downloaded a free font called “VCR OSD Mono” which makes it look extra VHS-like. Then we want the wave warp and the noise to be on top of the text, so I’m going to move the text layer below our adjustment layer.

And to make the text less sharp let’s search for the effect “Fast Blur” and let’s double click to apply it to the text layer. You will see that fast blur is now in our Essential Graphics panel and in our effect controls, if we increase the blurriness to 10, it’s too much. So let’s make it subtle and change it to 1. 

If you want to use this text in the future, you can right click to turn it into a motion graphics template and save it to your local templates folder. Then you can search for it and use it in future projects. 

Adding 90s Music

Now the video is almost complete, we just need some 90s music to round it out. Luckily Musicbed’s search and browse features make fit super easy to get the sound you like.  After you sign up for a 30-day Musicbed trial, you can go to browse music and begin to download for editing. 

While 90’s music is diverse, for me, the mood I get when I think 90s,I feel uplifted, happy, and I feel a bit of love. Of course, there were sad songs too, but for this video, I’ll focus more on the happy. So I’m going to apply those mood filters by hitting the check mark next to each mood.

Underneath music attributes, I’ll also apply “grungy” because for me 90’s was happy, but also grungy! With these results we narrowed it down to 5 song selections:

I’ll typically playback 4-5 tracks I like and then I’ll make my decision. In this case, I’m going to go with Kiss it Better. I’m going to click on the track and download both the lyrical and the instrumental versions to my computer. 

Then I just import it into premiere and lay it down underneath the video layer in my timeline. And here is final result: 

That’s all there is to creating the effect. If you found this tutorial useful, be sure to give it some love below. Also, be sure to try out Musicbed for your next video using my 30-day trial link below.