A glitch transition plugin for After Effects with 32 recipes and a full Custom mode

DISKO Glitch, one of the DISKO Motion disks: $7.99, or the box set for $59.99.

DISKO Glitch is a glitch transition and glitch effect plugin for After Effects and Premiere Pro. It's a seedable, event-driven glitch engine: RGB split, tears, corrupt blocks, scanlines, signal noise, pixelation, bit crush, temporal echo and slices, plus six classic operators for blur, color, light, scale, slide and time. Pick one of 32 original recipes, or customize every operator.

DISKO Glitch's Digital Shred recipe, one of the 32, on a shot of the Golden Gate.

The problem with most glitches

A glitch is supposed to look like an accident. Making one look good is not an accident. The quick route is a pack of pre-rendered overlays, which look exactly like the pack of pre-rendered overlays everybody else bought. The other route is noise on every frame, which looks like a loose cable rather than a choice somebody made.

What you actually want is a glitch with timing: one that hits, holds for a beat and gets out, that you can tune, and that comes out the same tomorrow as it did today. Without anybody wiggling a tracking knob.

How the glitch engine works

Glitch thinks in events, not noise. A glitch happens with a chance you set, lasts for a duration you set, and eases in and out, so it lands like a hiccup in the signal instead of a constant fizz.

Every recipe is seedable. Change the Random Seed for a new variation, keep the seed for the same result, and freeze any pattern you like the look of. Temporal echo and slices smear time for the looks where the picture lags behind itself. Edge modes (mirror, wrap or transparent) decide what fills in where the picture gets pushed past its own edge. It works on titles with alpha, and it renders at 8, 16 and 32 bits per channel.

Using it as a glitch transition

Put Glitch over a cut, ease Amount up into the edit and back down out of it, and the cut happens inside the glitch. Start from one of the 32 recipes; when it's nearly right, Customize Preset turns the recipe into settings you can change, operator by operator, and you finish it yourself.

The controls that matter

• Preset: the 32 original recipes.
• Customize Preset: one click from a recipe to every one of its settings.
• Amount, Mix and Speed: the dials you'll reach for first.
• Random Seed: a new variation every time you change it, the same one every time you don't.
• Timing and Output: when the glitch events happen, how long they last and how they ease.
• Operators and Digital: the ingredients themselves, for building your own.

Good for

• Glitch transitions between shots
• Title and logo reveals, with alpha intact
• Tech, gaming and music promos
• Broken-signal looks: scanlines, signal noise, tears and corrupt blocks
• Time-smear looks with temporal echo and slices

Requirements and price

DISKO Glitch runs in After Effects 2024 or later and Premiere Pro 2024 or later, on macOS 12 or later (Apple silicon and Intel) or Windows 10 or 11, 64-bit.

Glitch is $7.99, once. It's also one of the disks in the DISKO Motion V1 box set, $59.99 for the whole set. There's no subscription, every 1.x update is free, and when V2 arrives it will be a paid upgrade you can skip, because V1 keeps working.

The trial is the whole effect, every control included. Renders carry a DISKO MOTION TRIAL watermark until you enter a license code in Effect Controls > Options (in After Effects, Window > DISKO Motion License.jsx works too). Codes work offline, on up to three computers you use.

Glitch is one disk on the DISKO Motion shelf. The overview has the rest, the box set, and why any of this comes on floppy disks.

Break it on purpose. Then break it exactly the same way twice.