prosthetic knowledge

Glitching Video With Audacity Tutorial 

QAP has put together a tutorial to process videos with glitch effects by using the freeware sound program Audacity. Using videos from different file formats produce various results:

So here it is ! I’ll tell you how to generate glitching video really simply (no coding, no play in HexEditor, just some clicks and lot’s of encoding and decoding) ! if you are here, then I don’t need to explain you what is a glitch, and I won’t run into technical explanation about U-LAW, A-LAW, video compression and stuffs. if you’re curious about it, there is still that good guy of wikipedia around here.

I’m doing this little tutorial cause I spent lot’s of time working on generating glitching videos, and around 80% of this spent time leaded to unreadable/unusable video files, so there is no need for everybody to do the same mistakes!

Ok so, no more chatting, here come the glitch!

You’ll need your source file that you wanna glitch, obviously a video file, but it needs to be “pre-encoded” using specific codecs, and each of those specific codecs lead to different kind of glitch (see the gallery below to see what kind of glitch you wanna do and so what kind of codecs you’ll use). And just Use your favorite encoding program (like SUPER, AviDemux, VirtualDub, or even After Effects etc…) to encode it.
The smaller the video is, the faster Audacity work on it. But as there tons of different codecs, there are some that are really not powerful for video compression and give you huge files, but for some of them, you’ll get astonishing glitches !! 

There are plenty of video and still examples - I’ve picked my favourite above based on the video file format they have used: .theora, .qt_mpeg4, qt_animation, and .flv.

You can read the tutorial and check out the examples here