Intentional image quality reduction — adding noise, artifacts, compression. Simulates aged film stock or low-res security footage for stylistic or narrative effect.
Degradation
You intentionally introduce quality losses into the image — noise, blocking, color distortions, all the things that genuine old material or cheap surveillance technology brings with it. This sounds counterintuitive when you otherwise spend all day trying to make the image cleaner. But degradation is a VFX tool to create authenticity or to mark a specific narrative perspective. A found-footage sequence, a security camera shot, a look into archives from the 90s — all of these rely on you intentionally degrading the image.
In practice, this works through several layers. You add luminance and chrominance noise to simulate film grain or sensor artifacts. You apply JPEG or H.264 compression blocks if it's supposed to look like cheap video surveillance. Color sampling effects (chroma subsampling), slight focus blur, perhaps even interlacing lines — the toolbox is large. With modern node-based compositing systems, you usually don't build this simply as a layer, but as a controlled procedure because you need later adjustments. The noise must not be too uniform (that immediately looks artificial), but must have temporal and spatial variation.
The critical point: Don't overdo it. Real old Super 8 films don't look like maximum grain in a plugin. Real VHS has a specific, almost organic noise profile. If you calibrate it incorrectly, it immediately looks like a filter effect instead of an authentic source. Some DPs therefore work backward: They look at material from the era they want to simulate and reverse-engineer the profile in the composite. Or you film low-res reference takes with old hardware to capture the real degradation fingerprint and then match it.
Degradation also influences color decisions. Old negatives yellow, video codecs from the 2000s had typical color distortions, VHS material shows color bleed. These effects together — not just individually — create believable contextualization. In editing, degradation is often used as a marker for POV changes: The main film material remains pristine, but the iPhone recording or the security camera feed gets the full degradation treatment. This immediately signals to the viewer: This is a different source, a different perspective.