Teletect Enhancer

Teletect is the author’s name for this family of programs. "Enhancer" is the consumer-electronics name for a video detail processor: a box that boosts edges to make tired tape copies look sharper. Bent enhancers are a staple of glitch video because their peaking and clipping stages are so easy to push past their design limits.

Enhance is the drive into the clipper. At 0% the core runs at unity gain and the picture is clean. Turning clockwise adds up to six octaves of drive (about ×62), so the top of the range is a hard black/white threshold. Enhance also raises color gain together with Chroma and tightens the soft knee of the clipper.

Ring sets edge peaking, up to ×3.75. With Ring Branch (Switch 9) on, it also sets the level of the resonator trail behind each edge, up to ×7.5.

Chroma raises color gain (up to ×12 with Enhance, hard-clipped), adds rainbow fringes along brightness edges, and triggers color tearing at edges. The tearing threshold falls as the knob rises. With Chroma Branch (Switch 11) on, Chroma also sets the depth of the color lag or the luma/chroma cross-coupling.

Bias is neutral at its center, with a small dead band. At low Enhance it acts as a black-level offset. At high Enhance it moves the clip threshold: it decides what goes black and what goes white.

Smear fades in a short blur over the first half of its travel and a long smear over the second half. Color smears farther than luma. With Echo Branch (Switch 8) on, Smear also sets the echo or oscillator feedback amount. Smear does not change the rate of the ringing or echoes; those time bases are fixed.

Blowout lowers the highlight threshold. Highlights expand, flatten and streak to the right as a trailing overload, and either bleach or erupt in color depending on Variation. Above about 60% the overload decays four times more slowly, so the streaks get much longer.

Clip Branch adds a second clipping behavior. With Variation 1, whites fold back over a Bias-dependent rail (they invert). With Variation 2, values below a Bias-dependent threshold collapse to black and lose their color.

Echo Branch adds feedback echoes, with Smear as the amount. With Variation 1, edge contours repeat and feed back through the clipper, producing stripe trains. With Variation 2, a picture-gated oscillator draws black-and-white stripes wherever the picture is bright, with alternating line taps.

Ring Branch adds a resonator trail, excited by edges, to the core peaking. Variation 1 gives a tight ringing trail; Variation 2 gives an inverted, wider and longer trail.

Variation selects the flavor of every engaged branch and the color behavior of the core:

The original bent hardware this program is modeled on used three-position switches (off / variation 1 / variation 2). Videomancer’s switches have two positions, so each branch has its own Off/On switch and they share one Variation switch.

Chroma Branch adds extra color misbehavior, with Chroma as the depth: lagging, bleeding color with Variation 1, or luma/chroma cross-coupling with Variation 2.

Mix blends the original and processed pictures in 64 steps. At 0% the output is the dry input, bit for bit. At 100% it is fully processed.

A video enhancer adds a scaled copy of the picture’s high-frequency content back to itself. Edges get a dark undershoot on one side and a bright overshoot on the other, so they look sharper. Push the gain and the overshoots ring. Push the drive into the following clipper and the picture flattens into hard black and white. Teletect Enhancer runs its core on 10-bit YUV with exponential drive, so the useful clean range sits low on the Enhance knob and the hard-clip range sits high.

Circuit benders rewire these boxes to cross-couple luma and chroma, feed outputs back into inputs, and overload the highlight stages. Each branch emulates one family of those modifications. All branches pass through the Enhance drive stage, so they interact: Echo contours are re-clipped, Clip folds what Ring overshoots, and Chroma Branch lag smears the colors that Chroma tears.

Nothing in Enhancer is random. All recursive state resets during blanking, so a static input frame repeats exactly from frame to frame. Movement in the output comes from movement in the source and from your hands on the controls.