Retro Matrix

Turns the picture into glowing text on an old computer screen that slowly scrolls upwards. For control rooms, hacker scenes and memories of early computers: the figure stays readable in the brightness of the text while the text flows past.

Group: Text & Glyph · How to add an effect

Retro Matrix

Original

Use it for: a computer screen in a set or a control room · a figure that dissolves into data · the look of a terminal from the seventies and eighties.

• Phosphor – the colour of the text: amber, green, white.
• Speed – how fast the text scrolls.
• Scanlines – how strongly the lines of the screen show.

Tip: set Background to 0 for a pure black screen: only the glowing text remains, and the figure shines out of it.

Pick one in the Preset row of the effect card. It sets all controls at once, in one undo step, and the row then shows its name until you change something. A control with keyframes keeps them, and the card says so.

Green Screen – fine green text on a dark screen, the classic computer terminal. For control rooms, old films and anything that should look like a computer at work.

Paper White – crisp white text without scanlines, like the paper-white monitors of the eighties; Black Level 0.15 keeps the dark stage a dark screen. Cool and clean; it sits well next to black-and-white footage.

Teletype – large amber digits that crawl up slowly; Black Level 0.14 empties the dark stage, so the bright digits carry the figure. Reads from far away on a projection and gives a scene a calm, heavy rhythm.

Binary Stream – zeros and ones in cold cyan that race upwards; Black Level 0.15 keeps them to the figure. Restless and technical: data flowing, a system under load.

The Style menu at the top of the card switches to another look of the same engine and keeps your values and keyframes, for example Glyph Matrix, Symbol Matrix or Matrix Rain. Phosphor and Scanlines belong to Retro Matrix: the other looks keep their values for when you switch back.

Cell Size – how big one character is. 8–10 gives fine print, 14 a readable terminal, 24 and more large characters that read on a projection; at 72 the frame holds only 15 rows. The text scrolls by whole rows a second, so large characters also move faster across the frame. It counts pixels of a 1080p picture, so the preview, the thumbnails and a 4K export show the same grid. 4 to 72 px, default 14 px.

Amount – how much of the effect you see. At 0 the original picture, unchanged; in between, the screen fades in over it. Keyframe it to let a scene turn into a computer screen on a cue. 0 to 1, default 1.

Background – how much the cells glow behind their characters. At 0 the text stands on black; 0.1–0.3 lets the bright parts of the picture glow softly behind the text, so the figure reads at a glance; towards 1 the bright cells fill with the phosphor colour and the text disappears into a glowing mosaic. Dark parts of the picture stay dark at any value. 0 to 1, default 0.2.

Black Level – the brightness up to which the picture counts as black. Everything darker gets the dimmest glow and the first character of the ramp, the space in most ramps (with Invert Ramp the last, densest one), and keeps it, even at Roll 1, so a grey stage turns into an empty dark screen and the lit figure stands out; the rest of the picture spreads over the whole ramp and the glow. 0 to 0.9, default 0.

Invert Ramp – swaps the ends of the ramp: dark parts get the dense characters and bright parts the sparse ones, like a negative. The glow still follows the picture, so bright parts stay bright. The higher Roll, the less it shows. Either on or off, default off.

Scanlines – how dark the gaps between the lines of the screen get. At 0 the text is clean; 0.5 gives the soft lines of a monitor; at 1 the gaps turn black and every character is drawn in separate strokes, like an old tube up close. There is one line every 3 pixels of a 1080p frame, and the lines move with the text. On smaller frames, such as a reduced Preview Quality or the thumbnails, they fade into an even dimming instead of flickering; a 1080p or 4K export shows them in full. 0 to 1, default 0.5.

Ramp – the row of characters the picture is built from, from the darkest to the brightest part; each character of the text is drawn from the neighbours of its own one in this row (see Roll). Numeric ( 123456789 after a space) gives a screen of digits, dim 1, 2 and 3 in the dark and dense 7, 8 and 9 in the light; Standard and Detailed use punctuation and letters, like text; Binary zeros and ones; Blocks and Bars shaded blocks and bars. While a Custom Ramp is typed, the row rests and the card dims it. In the menu: Standard, Detailed, Blocks, Bars, Binary and 2 more, default Numeric.

Custom Ramp – your own characters, from dark to bright, instead of the Ramp: letters such as ilmwMW, or a single character that fills every cell. Spaces at the end are ignored, and a ramp longer than 256 characters is thinned to 256, spread from its first to its last (the card says so). Clear it to use the Ramp again. Any text, default empty.

Font – the lettering. Monospace draws the even characters of a terminal; Serif and Sans Serif give rounder ones, each narrowed to fit its cell. Monospace, Serif, Sans Serif, default Monospace.

Weight – how heavy the strokes are. Heavier characters carry more light, so the screen gets brighter. How many steps you see depends on the font: the built-in monospace font of many systems only has regular (up to 500) and bold (600 and more). Keyframes step from one weight to the next. 200 to 900, default 600.

Phosphor – the colour the text glows in, like the phosphor of an old screen: amber (the default), green #33ff66 (Green Screen), a cool white (Paper White) or any other colour. The brightest characters glow hotter than the colour itself, so amber turns towards yellow in the light parts. Pick a colour, default #ff8514.

Speed – how fast the text scrolls up. At 1 it moves three rows a second, smoothly; at 0 it stands still and characters change only where the picture changes; 3 and more races. The picture itself stays in place: the text flows through it, and each character takes the brightness of the spot it passes. It follows the playhead, so a paused picture stands still and the export matches the preview; a keyframed Speed speeds up smoothly. 0 to 5, default 1.

Roll – how far a character of the text may stray from the character of its brightness. At 0 every cell shows exactly that character, like ASCII, and the dark stage stays empty; 0.3 picks from a window of four characters: its own and its three nearest neighbours in the ramp, so the screen fills with text while dense characters still mark the bright parts; at 1 any character can stand anywhere, and the figure shows only in the brightness. Any value above 0 draws from at least two characters. 0 to 1, default 0.3.

Retro Matrix works in nine stages, one folder each in the Nodes tab: Scroll counts how many rows the text has moved, Cell Grid cuts the frame into cells that move up with it, Cell Sampling & Tone reads the colour and brightness under each cell, Tone to Glyph picks the character of that brightness, Glyph Offset gives every cell of the text a fixed random character of its own, Roll Window keeps it near the character of its brightness, Atlas Alpha looks up where the character covers the cell, Scanlines draws the lines of the screen, and Ink & Appearance lights the character in the phosphor colour on its ground. Click a folder’s header to open it. Scroll, Glyph Offset and Scanlines make the screen; Roll Window works as in Glyph Matrix, the other four as in ASCII. Retro Matrix is one look of the glyph engine that the Text & Glyph looks share; its Style menu switches between them.

Clock – how far the clock has run: Seconds × Speed (the Multiply above it), or Speed Travel, the distance a keyframed Speed has covered, when Speed has keyframes (Greater Than checks for that).

Scroll – the clock times Scroll Rate 3: how many rows the text has moved up, three a second at Speed 1.

Turns – how many whole periods of Scroll Period 12 288 rows the text has passed (Divide, Floor): one every 68 minutes at Speed 1.

Wrapped Scroll – the scroll minus the whole periods (Multiply, Subtract), so it starts again at 0 after each period. The text repeats with the same period (Glyph Offset), so you never see the jump; it keeps the numbers small, so the characters stay sharp even hours into a show.

Scroll Offset – the wrapped scroll as a shift of the grid, upwards only (Combine Vector with 0 sideways). Cell Grid adds it.

Multiply – the pixel’s place on the grid, counted in cells: its position (UV) times the number of cells across and down. The Cell Pixels come from Cell Size in 1080p steps, as in ASCII.

Scrolled Grid – that place plus the Scroll Offset (Add): the grid moves up, and the rows of text with it.

Floor – which cell of the moving text the pixel lies in, counted in lines of text since the start. Glyph Offset draws the cell’s character from this number, so a character stays the same while it travels up.

Fraction – where the pixel lies inside its cell; Atlas Alpha draws the character with it, so every character stays whole, wherever the scroll is.

Subtract – the middle of the cell minus the Scroll Offset: back to the place on the picture where the cell is right now. Cell Sampling & Tone reads the picture there, so each character takes the brightness of the spot it passes.

Clamped Image Sample – reads the input picture at the cell centre, never outside the frame.

Split RGB + Alpha – the cell’s colour and its transparency. Retro Matrix uses only the brightness and the transparency: the colour comes from Phosphor.

Luminance – the brightness of the cell colour, weighted the way the eye sees it (green counts most).

Divide – applies Black Level: the luminance minus Black Level (Subtract), divided by what is left above it (the other Subtract: One minus Black Level). The Clamp next to Black Level keeps it between 0 and Black Level Max 0.9.

Clamp – keeps the result between 0 and 1, so everything darker than Black Level becomes 0: the Tone. It picks the character and sets how strongly it glows.

Subtract – one minus the tone, for Invert Ramp.

Switch – the tone as it is, or inverted when Invert Ramp is on.

Clamp – keeps the tone just under 1, so the brightest cells get the last character and never one past it.

Multiply – spreads the tone over the number of characters in the ramp.

Floor – the number of the cell’s own character: the Tone Glyph that Roll Window keeps the text near.

Text Turns – how many whole periods of Text Period 12 288 lines lie above this line of text (Split Vector takes the line from the Line Cell; Add Half, Divide, Floor). The half keeps the count exact at the border of a period.

Text Line – the line within its period (Multiply, Subtract): the same number the line had one period earlier, so the text repeats exactly when Scroll wraps.

Text Random – a random number from 0 to 1 for each cell of the moving text (Random (Cell) of the column and the Text Line, put together by Combine Vector). It belongs to the cell’s column and line of text, so it travels up with the scroll and never changes on the way: that is what makes it read as text, not as noise.

Glyph Offset – the random number times the number of characters, rounded down (Multiply, Floor): how far this character of the text sits from the character of its brightness. Roll Window folds it into the window around it.

Lit – Greater Than: is the cell’s Tone above 0, so brighter than Black Level? The other Greater Than asks whether Black Level is set at all (above 0).

Dark Roll – a Switch: 0 while Black Level is above 0, otherwise Roll. At Black Level 0, also in effects saved before this hold existed, every cell rolls as before.

Cell Roll – the second Switch: Roll for a lit cell, the Dark Roll for a dark one. The window below is built from it, so with Black Level set a dark cell keeps its character, even at Roll 1, and the dark stage stays empty.

Ceiling – the Cell Roll times the ramp’s length minus one (Subtract, Multiply), rounded up: how many neighbours a character may be drawn from. Any Cell Roll above 0 gives at least one.

Window – that number plus the cell’s own character (Add): from 1 at Roll 0 to the whole ramp at Roll 1.

Floor – half the window, as a whole number (Multiply by Half first): how far the window reaches below the cell’s own character.

Window Start – the Tone Glyph minus that half, kept between 0 and the ramp’s length minus the window (Clamp). The window never hangs over an end of the ramp: the brightest cells draw from the densest characters and never from empty ones.

Step – the cell’s own place in its window plus the Glyph Offset (Subtract, then Add).

Divide – the step divided by the window (half a step added first, so the division never lands just below a whole number); Floor counts the whole windows passed.

Place in Window – the step minus those whole windows (Multiply, Subtract): a place in the window, picked by the cell’s Text Random.

Glyph Index – Window Start plus the place in the window (Add): the character the cell shows. At Roll 1 the window is the whole ramp, so any character can stand anywhere.

Floor – the row of the character on the atlas, a sheet of all characters of the ramp drawn in the chosen Font and Weight.

Subtract – its column on the sheet.

Clamp – keeps the place inside the cell half a pixel of the sheet away from the edges of the character’s square (Half Texel, 0.5 of the 64 pixels of a square, and One Minus Half Texel). The sheet is read with smoothing, so a read any closer would mix in a little of the neighbouring character: blocks and bars would show thin seams wherever a cell is not a whole number of pixels.

Sample Image – reads the sheet at the character’s square plus the place inside the cell.

Split Vector – the Glyph Coverage: 1 inside the strokes of the character, 0 around them.

Line Pitch – how far apart the lines are on this frame: Line Spacing 3 times the Frame Scale (the shorter side of the frame divided by 1080, from Cell Grid). 3 pixels at 1080p, 6 at 4K.

Lines – how many lines lie above the pixel on the screen: its row in the grid (Split Vector of the Grid Position) times the Lines per Row, the Cell Pixels divided by the Line Pitch (Divide, Multiply).

Scroll Phase – the Wrapped Scroll times the Lines per Row (Multiply), and only its Fraction: how far between two lines the scroll has moved them. It moves the lines with the text.

Line Phase – Lines plus Scroll Phase, and again only the Fraction (Add, Fraction): where the pixel sits between two lines, 0 on a line. Only this small number goes on to the sine, so the lines stay even hours into a show.

Line Dip – the sine of Line Phase × Pi, squared (Sine, Power with Two): 0 on a line, 1 halfway between two lines.

Line Fade – a Smoothstep from Fade From 1.5 to Fade To 3 over the Line Pitch: 1 when the lines are at least 3 pixels apart, 0 at 1.5 and closer. A Mix with Half fades the Line Dip towards an even 0.5 there, so small frames show an even dimming instead of a flickering pattern.

Scanline – one minus Scanlines (Clamp keeps it from 0 to 1) times the faded dip (Multiply, Subtract): 1 on a line, 1 − Scanlines between the lines. Ink & Appearance multiplies the glowing text by it.

Remix: open the Constants folder and set Line Spacing to 6: half as many, broader lines, like a big old television seen from close by.

Ink – the Phosphor colour (Vector 4 to RGB) times the Coverage: the Glyph Coverage from Atlas Alpha, lifted to Background around the strokes (the Mix with One). The character glows at full colour, the cell around it at Background.

Coverage – that lifted coverage on its own: 1 in the strokes, Background between them.

Brightness – Tone Base 0.15 plus Tone Factor 1.6 times the Tone (Multiply, Add): dim in the dark parts, 1.75 in the brightest, where the colour overdrives and amber turns towards yellow. The Lit Ink is the Ink times this Brightness.

Glyph Cell – the Lit Ink times the Scanline from Scanlines: the finished screen.

Faded Premultiplied – fades the untouched picture, pixel by pixel, towards the screen by Amount. Both are first multiplied by their transparency (Original Alpha, Cell Alpha), and the transparency fades the same way (Faded Alpha).

Faded Color – divides by Faded Alpha (at least a millionth) to get back to plain colour. Mixed this way, the colour a transparent pixel hides never shows as a dark or green fringe around a cut-out figure while Amount fades.

• Size. Cell Size counts pixels of a frame whose shorter side is 1080: a 4K export, a portrait frame, a lower Preview Quality and the thumbnails show the same grid. A cell is never smaller than 2 pixels of the frame; below 2 px Cell Size renders as 2, and the card says so. The scanlines lie 3 pixels of a 1080p frame apart and fade into an even dimming of 1 − Scanlines / 2 where they would be closer than about 3 pixels of the output.
• Time. The text scrolls up 3 × Speed rows a second with the timeline time; after 12 288 rows (68 minutes at Speed 1) the scroll wraps and the text repeats, so you never see a jump and the characters and lines stay sharp hours into a show. Scrubbing, playback and export give the same frame for the same moment, and a paused picture needs no extra rendering. With keyframes on Speed it moves by the distance Speed has travelled, so it never jumps.
• Text. Each cell of the scrolled grid keeps one random character for its column and line of text, drawn from a window of 1 + Roll × (ramp − 1) characters, rounded up, around the character of its brightness and kept inside the ramp. It glows at Phosphor × (0.15 + 1.6 × brightness). Scanlines and Roll outside 0 to 1 render as 0 or 1, and the card and the tools say so.
• Characters. The whole ramp is drawn in one font size, so its tallest character spans 88 % of the cell height. Blocks and Bars are exact shapes, read half a pixel inside each character, so they join without seams at any cell size.
• Transparency. Each cell takes the transparency of the picture at its centre, so a cut-out figure keeps its outline in whole cells; as the text scrolls, its top and bottom edges move in steps of a cell. Amount fades the transparency back to the original’s, pixel by pixel, and mixes the colours weighted by their transparency, so the hidden colour of a transparent pixel never shows as a fringe around a cut-out figure.
• Saved projects. A Retro Matrix stores its node setup and keeps its look. Effects saved without a stored setup now scroll their text; before, the frame was cut into bands of the ramp’s length whose borders cut characters in half, the text did not scroll, and the scanlines were one pixel of the output wide, so the preview and an export at another size differed, a bug. They load with amber, Roll 1, Background 0 and Scanlines 0.36, the values they had; their text now glows more strongly with the picture’s brightness. A stored setup keeps its smaller characters, which cover about half of a cell, and the way it read the character sheet, so saved Blocks or Bars can show thin seam lines on frames whose cells are not a whole number of pixels; Black Level is 0 there. A stored setup also keeps the earlier Cell Size in pixels of the output, so its preview at another quality and an export at another size show different grids; add the effect again for the 1080p grid. Presets fully apply only to effects added in this version: on a stored setup from before, the card has no Background, Black Level, Roll, Scanlines or Phosphor row, so a preset leaves those values out.
• More: Effect system · Node Catalog · Styles and presets.