Z_Glitch
Drop it on — it's already moving. One slider does the rest
- Nuke
- DaVinci Resolve
- After Effects
01What it does
- Six looks that write the controls, so you can see what they did
- A pixel sort that really sorts — heapsort per run, no approximation
- Outputs a displacement map, so the rest of your comp tears with it
- Anything left at 0 is skipped, not computed and thrown away
02A closer look
One node, six looks, and every control still yours.
Subtle, VHS, Datamosh, Digital, Cyberpunk, Sorted. Picking one writes the controls rather than hiding them, so you can see what the look was made of and carry on from there.
Amount is the shot.
One slider from clean plate to total collapse. Speed decides how long each pattern holds — at 0 it freezes so you can design on a still. Seed makes it repeatable on every machine.
A Roto says where, not where it stops.
Connect a matte to input 2 and set Mask Mode to Region. The matte picks where the glitch happens, and every tear and tile it touches breaks whole, past the edge, so nothing looks cut out. Spill sets how far it reaches. Clip still stops exactly at the matte when that is what the shot needs.
It can tear the rest of the comp with it.
Four outputs: the picture, the change alone on black, a matte of what is tearing this frame, and the tear as a displacement map. Feed that last one to an IDistort and your title warps with the plate instead of sitting on it.
The pixel sort actually sorts.
A GPU kernel cannot see a whole run, so it counts brighter neighbours and guesses. This heapsorts each run, and long runs keep their gradients instead of banding.
Every control, and what it does.
Fifteen of the forty, the ones that change the picture most. Each clip moves one control and nothing else; every control is listed under them.
Main.
Blocks.
Chroma, Analog and Digital.
Colour, Scanlines and Sort.
Mask and Output.
All 40 controls.
In the order the panel shows them.
Main.
Look — Six starting points. Picking one writes the controls below. Amount — Master strength for everything. 0 is a clean pass-through. Speed — How fast the pattern reshuffles. 0 freezes it. Seed — A different pattern, same look. Same frames on every machine.
Burst.
Burst — Fire the glitch in beats instead of all the time. Interval — Length of one beat cycle, in frames. Hold — Frames the glitch stays on in each cycle. Randomise — Chance a beat is skipped, so the rhythm is irregular.
Blocks.
Direction — Rows, columns or 2D tiles. Size — Row height, column width or tile size, in pixels. Aspect — Tile shape, for 2D tiles. Size Variation — Mixes cell sizes so the tears leave the grid. Shift — How far a torn block slides, in pixels. Density — How many blocks tear on any frame. Cross Shift — A nudge along the other axis. Scramble — A torn block copies its pixels from elsewhere.
Chroma and Analog.
RGB Split — Pulls red and blue apart, harder in torn blocks. Tape Warble — A scrolling sine wobble on every row. Warble Frequency — How many waves down the frame.
Digital.
Mosaic — Chunky pixels inside torn blocks. Colour Levels — Posterises the whole frame. 64 is off. Channel Rotate — Wrong colours inside torn blocks. Static — Grain, stronger inside torn blocks. Dropout — Torn blocks drop to a black bar or static.
Scanlines.
Amount — Depth of the CRT lines. Frequency — Lines down the frame. Roll — Drift speed of the lines, up or down.
Pixel Sort.
Pixel Sort — Sorts bright runs into streaks. 0 costs nothing. Max Length — Longest a streak can get, in pixels. Threshold — Only pixels above this brightness sort. Vertical — Streaks down columns instead of along rows. Reverse — Flips which end of a streak is bright.
Mask.
Channel — Alpha, luminance, red, green or blue of input 2. Invert — Flips the matte. Soften — Blurs the matte edge, in pixels. Expand — Grows or shrinks a soft matte. Mode — Clip stops at the matte. Region breaks past it. Spill — Region only: how far past the matte it reaches.
Output.
Output — Final, Effect Only, Glitch Matte or Displacement. Mix — Dissolves back to the untouched plate.
Nuke, Resolve and After Effects — on the CPU.
Written for Nuke. It loads in DaVinci Resolve and After Effects with the same controls and the same result — tested in After Effects 2025 and 2026 on Windows. It runs on the processor, not the graphics card, so HD plays back and 4K wants caching. Worth knowing before you buy rather than after.
03Specifications
- Category
- Stylize
- OFX API
- 1.5
- Contexts
- Filter · General
- Bit depths
- 8-bit · 16-bit · 32-bit float
- Channels
- RGB · RGBA
- Processing
- CPU, multi-threaded
- Operating system
- Windows 10 · 11 (64-bit)
- Vendor
- ZHiCK
04The 7-day trial
The trial is the complete plugin — every control, your own footage, no features held back. One trial per machine.
When it ends the plugin keeps loading and keeps rendering the full effect, with a faint ZHiCK STUDIO watermark across the output. It does not vanish from the node list or fail a render: a licensing problem found at 2am should cost an obviously marked frame, never a farm job. Nothing about the paid version differs except the watermark — and anything that would hand you a result the watermark cannot reach.
05Installing it
ZHiCK Hub installs and updates the plugin for you, and is how the trial is issued. If you would rather not run it, the plugin is a folder you copy into the host's plugin path.
06Version history
- 1.0
20 Oct 2026 · 0.1 MB
First After Effects build. The same effect, controls and licence as the Nuke and Resolve version. Tested in After Effects 2025 and 2026 on Windows.
8 earlier versions
- 1.8
19 Oct 2026 · 0.1 MB
New Mask Mode. Clip stops the glitch exactly at your matte, as before. Region lets the matte choose where the glitch happens: every tear and tile it touches breaks whole and runs past the edge, so there is no roto line. Spill sets how far past the matte it can reach. Clip is the default, so existing comps render exactly as they did.
- 1.7
19 Oct 2026 · 0.1 MB
Pixel sort rebuilt. Streaks now follow the picture and end on its own edges, instead of all breaking on one straight line across the frame. The sort no longer washes out the blocks, noise and split around it, and the Sorted look is now a clean vertical drip. Segment Length is now Max Length. Comps that use the pixel sort will render differently; everything else is unchanged.
- 1.6
9 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
EULA 1.3 - the agreement now covers any paid ZHiCK product, not plugins alone. The effect is unchanged.
- 1.4
9 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
New node icon: the Z_Glitch mark now carries the tear as a chromatic split, which stays readable at the size Nuke draws it. The effect itself is unchanged from 1.3 - nothing in the render path moved, and your existing comps render identically.
- 1.3
8 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
The node now carries the Glitch mark instead of the shared ZHiCK one. Built at 64px rather than scaled down from the full artwork, so the scanlines still read at node size. Nothing else changed.
- 1.2
8 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
Renames
- 1.1
8 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
Corrects the licence agreement that ships inside the plugin. 1.0 carried a draft that offered a refund the shop does not give. The plugin binary is unchanged from 1.0.
- 1.0
8 Aug 2026 · 0.1 MB
07Licence
End User Licence Agreementv1.3 · 10 August 2026
ZHiCK products End User Licence Agreement Version 1.3, 10 August 2026 Vendor: Thanadet Sribandit, trading as ZHiCK (sole trader, Thailand) Contact: zhickstudio@gmail.com Governing law: Thailand This agreement covers any ZHiCK product you buy a licence for — a plugin today, and anything else sold under the ZHiCK name later. Tools given away free, including ZHiCK Hub, are not licensed under this agreement; their use is covered by the terms of sale instead. The terms of sale, and the current version of this agreement, are at https://zhickstudio.com/terms Sections 7 and 8 describe how a plugin behaves inside a host application, and apply only to products that are plugins. Everything else applies to every paid product. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Licence, not sale ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The software is licensed to you, not sold. ZHiCK retains all rights, title and interest in it, including all intellectual property rights. Subject to your compliance with this agreement and payment of the applicable fee, ZHiCK grants you a non-exclusive, non-transferable licence to install and use the software on the number of machines stated on the licence you bought. That number is shown on the product page, on your receipt, and in your account. A seat may be moved to another machine at any time, from your account. Re-activating a machine you have already activated does not consume a second seat, and reinstalling or losing the licence file costs you nothing. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 2. Which licence you need ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Licences come in two kinds. Which one applies depends on who pays for it, not on what you use it for. An Individual licence is bought by one person, with their own money. You may use it on client work, on commercials, on features, on anything at all — there is no restriction whatsoever on the work you produce with it. What an Individual licence does not cover is a company buying it on your behalf, or reimbursing you for it afterwards. A Studio licence is bought by a company or other organisation, and covers up to the number of machines stated on it. If the cost is met from a business account, this is the licence that applies — whether the software ends up running on five machines or on one. Dividing them this way is what keeps the individual price where it is. If your circumstances change after you buy, because you join a studio or a client takes over the cost, write to the address above and the difference will be settled sensibly. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 3. What you may not do ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- You may not redistribute, resell, rent, lease, sublicense or publish the software; remove or alter any notice in it; or reverse engineer, decompile or disassemble it, except to the extent that applicable law expressly permits this despite the restriction. A licence covers you, or the organisation named on it — see section 2. It may not be shared with another company or bundled into something else without written permission. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 4. Your output is yours ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- ZHiCK claims no rights over images, sequences, projects or any other output you produce using the software. You may use that output commercially without restriction or attribution. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 5. Updates and support ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A licence includes updates within the same major version — a 1.x licence receives every 1.x release — at no further cost. Support is by email, at the address above. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 6. Trial, and no refunds ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Purchases are final and are not refunded. This is why a free trial of the complete product is offered first: every control, your own footage, nothing held back. Please confirm the product does what you need, in the application and version you actually use, before buying. Where the law of your country gives you a refund right that cannot be waived, that right is unaffected by this clause. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 7. Supported applications (plugins only) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Each plugin states which applications it is supported in, on its product page and in ZHiCK Hub. Support means the plugin has been run there and is expected to keep working there. A plugin will not load in an application it does not list — it refuses rather than appearing where it cannot work properly. Applications not listed are not supported, whether or not the plugin happens to run in them. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 8. If a licence cannot be verified (plugins only) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The plugin checks its licence on your machine, offline. It never contacts a server to do so. If no valid licence is found — during a trial, after one expires, or if the licence file is missing — the plugin still loads and still renders the complete effect, with a faint "ZHiCK STUDIO" watermark across the output. It does not disappear from the plugin list and does not fail a render. A licensing problem should cost you an obviously marked frame, never a farm job or a deadline. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 9. No warranty ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The software is provided "as is", without warranty of any kind, express or implied, including but not limited to the warranties of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose and non-infringement. You are responsible for verifying its output before using it in delivered work. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 10. Limitation of liability ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To the maximum extent permitted by law, ZHiCK's total liability arising out of or relating to this agreement is limited to the amount you paid for the licence. ZHiCK is not liable for any indirect, incidental, special or consequential damages, or for lost profits, lost data, or missed deadlines. Nothing in this agreement limits liability that cannot be limited by law. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 11. Termination ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This licence ends automatically if you breach it. On termination you must stop using the software and remove all copies. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 12. Third-party software ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The software includes third-party components licensed under their own terms. See THIRD-PARTY-NOTICES.txt, distributed with the product.
08Still deciding?
Ask me anything about it — whether it fits your shot, your host version, or your pipeline. I built it for my own work, so the answer is usually specific.
zhickstudio@gmail.com