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Find systems, devices, components, principles, and effects without losing their place in the image chain.

componentAnalog camera signal processing

The camera electronics that turn raw image-tube current into a levelled, corrected, bandwidth-limited video output.

effectAperture-shaped bokeh

Why an out-of-focus point copies the aperture outline — and how a regular-polygon convolution kernel turns night highlights into visible iris shapes.

effectAstigmatism

Why an off-axis point can focus at two different image distances — and how a field-oriented line spread reproduces the resulting directional blur.

effectBright-region bloom

How intense target regions spread into neighbouring samples, producing a soft halo that grows with highlight level.

systemBroadcast

The end-to-end television path that forms a broadcast signal, radiates it through a channel, and recovers video at a receiver.

deviceCamera

A shared optical front end followed by film, analog electronic, or digital capture.

effectCamera-tube target softness

How finite target resolution, charge spreading, beam footprint, and analogue bandwidth soften spatial detail in a camera-tube image.

effectChemical spots and processing damage

How uneven contact with developer, bleach, fixer, wash water, or contaminants can change local emulsion density and leave soft-edged light, dark, or stained blotches fixed to individual film frames.

principleColour models and spaces

A colour model defines coordinates; a colour space makes them specific through reference conditions and, where applicable, primaries, white and transfer behaviour.

effectColour-film dye response

How spectrally overlapping emulsion layers form cyan, magenta, and yellow dye records whose nonlinear interactions reshape hue, saturation, and tone — and why faithful correction is a three-dimensional colour transform.

effectComa

Why an off-axis point grows an asymmetric comet-shaped footprint — and how a primary-coma pupil map reproduces the field-dependent point spread.

effectDark-region electrical noise

How target dark current and electrical fluctuations become most visible where the useful video signal is weak.

effectDefocus

Why a scene point becomes a circle of confusion when its image plane does not coincide with the sensor — and what a uniform disk blur can and cannot reproduce.

effectDiffraction stars

Why straight aperture edges turn bright point sources into directional rays — and how a brightness-gated line gather reproduces the pattern without blurring the whole frame.

effectEncoder luma/chroma delay mismatch

How unequal travel time through the encoder displaces colour information horizontally from the brightness structure that belongs to it.

effectField curvature

Why a lens can focus a flat subject onto a curved surface — and how a field-dependent disk blur reveals the mismatch with a flat sensor.

deviceFilm camera

A mechanical camera that times exposure with a shutter and advances photosensitive film through a registered frame gate.

effectFilm dust and dirt

How particles on or close to film form compact, frame-bound silhouettes whose sharpness and displayed polarity reveal where and when contamination entered the photochemical chain.

effectFilm exposure flicker

How frame-to-frame changes in shutter timing alter the exposure of complete film frames, producing a global brightness pulse without moving or locally deforming the image.

effectFilm fading and ageing

How unequal dye survival, metallic-silver loss, support staining, and spatially uneven deterioration change a stored film element over time.

effectFilm grain

How randomly distributed photosensitive grains become visible density variation after development — and how to approximate that moving, exposure-dependent texture without turning it into RGB sensor noise.

effectFilm halation

How intense light that passes through the emulsion can scatter back from the film base, exposing nearby image-forming material and leaving a soft, often red-orange halo around highlights.

effectFilm light leak

How stray light entering through a camera or magazine seam exposes part of the film outside the intended lens-and-shutter path, producing a soft edge or corner fog that may vary as the strip moves.

deviceFilm projector

A reproduction device that advances developed film through a gate, holds each frame for illumination, and projects it through an output lens.

effectFilm scratches

How abrasive contact during film transport removes or scores emulsion into narrow longitudinal tracks whose displayed polarity depends on the damaged generation and later copying.

effectFocus breathing

Why changing focus can subtly change framing — and how to reproduce that field-of-view shift without confusing it with defocus.

effectFrame jitter and gate weave

How imperfect film registration shifts each exposed or reproduced frame relative to a fixed gate, producing rigid frame-to-frame image movement that usually follows the transport axis.

effectFrame-gate shadow

How a small gap between film and the camera gate turns the aperture edge into a narrow, slightly soft rectangular shadow around the recorded frame.

effectHorizontal edge falloff

How scan and readout nonuniformity can reduce signal level toward the beginning and end of each horizontal line.

effectHorizontal scan instability

How horizontal beam-deflection variation shifts individual camera-raster lines sideways, producing line-dependent jitter and waviness.

principleHow analogue television carries an image

How a picture becomes one electrical signal, travels as a radio wave, and is rebuilt by a television.

effectLateral chromatic aberration

How wavelength-dependent magnification separates colour channels toward the image edge — and how three inverse texture lookups reproduce it.

effectLens flare

How unintended reflections between optical surfaces turn a bright source into veiling light and a line of coloured ghosts — and how to approximate that pattern with bounded procedural sprites.

componentLens system

The groups of glass, mechanics, and aperture that form an image.

effectLongitudinal chromatic aberration

Why different wavelengths can focus at different distances behind a lens — and how channel-specific defocus produces coloured fringes around the same image features.

effectLow film frame rate

How a film camera’s intermittent transport limits capture cadence, turning continuous motion into a sequence of held frames that must carry one shared timestamp through the processing pipeline.

effectLuminance/chrominance bandwidth mismatch

How unequal baseband bandwidth changes the relative sharpness of brightness and colour detail before composite television encoding.

effectMonochrome film tonal response

How exposure and development turn a monochrome emulsion into a nonlinear density scale with compressed shadows, rolled highlights, and a printable tint — and how to reproduce that appearance with a bounded tone curve.

effectNatural optical vignetting

Why an ideal lens delivers less irradiance at oblique field angles — and how to apply the photometric law in linear light.

effectOvermodulation

How excessive composite-video excursion drives the vision carrier beyond its permitted envelope and damages highlights, colour, and sometimes synchronization.

mediumPhotochemical film

A light-sensitive material that records a latent image, turns it into stable optical density through development, and carries that image through handling, storage, and projection.

effectProjector frame slip

How failed or offset intermittent registration moves the projected gate across film-frame boundaries, exposing a horizontal frame line and part of a neighbouring image.

effectProjector gate weave

How lateral clearance or wear lets a projected film frame sit at changing side-to-side positions inside a fixed gate.

effectRadial distortion

Why straight lines bend near the edge of a real lens — and how to reproduce the mapping in a shader.

effectReduced contrast

How clamp, gain, black level, and camera transfer processing compress the separation between dark and bright signal levels.

effectSaturation loss

How unequal tube channels, colour encoding, bandwidth, and analogue processing reduce chroma relative to luminance.

effectScanline construction

How the camera tube’s electron beam converts a two-dimensional target pattern into a sequential signal one horizontal line at a time.

systemScene light

Light emitted by sources, transported through the scene, reflected by surfaces, and directed toward a camera or observer.

effectSync and blanking level error

How malformed composite-video references make a receiver misplace the picture in time or recover the wrong brightness range.

effectTangential distortion

How a decentered or tilted lens breaks radial symmetry — and how an iterative shader reconstructs the source coordinate.

deviceTransmitter

The transmitting-side equipment that forms the vision waveform, generates the television RF channel, and delivers it to the antenna feed.

deviceVidicon

A photoconductive camera tube that stores an optical image as a target-potential pattern and reads it with a scanning electron beam.

effectVidicon image lag

Why a photoconductive camera-tube target keeps part of a bright image between scans — and how a brightness-dependent temporal history reproduces the visible trail.

53 entries