Beamscan¶

Beamscan is an effect plugin for Adobe After Effects. It extracts a layer's contours as glowing electron-beam traces, then adds phosphor glow, a white-hot core and flicker to create the look of a vector scan display (a vector monitor or oscilloscope) in a single effect.

Features¶

• Beam extraction - Five sources: edges, luminance, alpha outlines, mask paths (tracing Bezier curves directly) and audio waveforms. Dashed and dotted lines, straight-line quantization for a low-poly look, smoothing and noise cleanup.
• Trace animation - Draw strokes one by one, like a physical vector display. Automatic loops and ping-pong playback, fading trails, retrace lines, bright corners, multiple beams and guide lines for untraced sections.
• Phosphor character - Layered glow, halation and frame-to-frame persistence that leaves trails behind moving footage. Choose phosphor and beam-core colors, or cycle hues along the drawing order.
• CRT and instrument effects - Screen curvature, edge falloff, graticules, shadow masks and aperture grilles, RGB misconvergence, color bleed, ringing, refresh flicker and vertical sync loss.
• Analog variation - Flicker, scan jitter, power-supply hum, dropouts and signal noise. All noise is deterministic and reproducible with a seed.
• Oscilloscope drawing - Use stereo audio's left and right channels as X/Y coordinates in Lissajous mode. Beam speed controls brightness, making dwell points brighter. See Oscilloscope Drawing.
• GPU rendering - Metal on Mac; CUDA for NVIDIA and DirectX 12 for AMD/Intel on Windows. Vector Signal processes contours and drawing order on the CPU; supported Apple Silicon/Metal settings finish glow, screen effects and compositing on the GPU. See CPU/GPU support.
• Supports 8/16/32bpc and Multi-Frame Rendering.

System requirements¶

Purchase¶

Beamscan is available through BOOTH and Gumroad. See Purchase for details, then follow the installation guide.