Old Film

Old Film is the "make it look like it survived a projector" node. It layers several classic film-damage artifacts onto a clip - random dust, vertical scratch lines, brightness flicker, uneven "development" density, and physical frame weave (the little shake of a worn transport) - and crucially, it lets you dial each artifact independently. That's the difference between this and a one-slider "vintage" preset: you can go subtle 1970s home-movie or full found-footage horror by turning up the scratches and leaving the flicker gentle.

It's a rendered stage, so it needs a ▶ Run and it uses a torch (GPU) backend. In goes COMFYTV_VIDEO, out comes COMFYTV_VIDEO.

The parameters, grouped by artifact

There are sixteen of them, which reads like a lot until you realize they're five small clusters:

• Dust: delta (default 14) and every (20) control how often random dust spots appear. Small every = dustier.
• Flicker: brightness_up (20), brightness_down (30), and brightness_every (70) - how much the frame brightens/darkens and how often. This is the "old bulb struggling" pulse.
• Development: develop_up (60), develop_down (20), and develop_duration (70) simulate uneven chemical development - density shifting across the frame over time. This is what makes footage feel aged rather than just grainy.
• Scratches: lines_num (5) and line_width (2) set the vertical scratch lines; lines_darker / lines_lighter (both 40) balance the dark and light emulsion damage.
• Weave: weave_x / weave_y (0) and weave_interval (0.6s) - the physical frame jitter. Start here for that "projector gate" instability.
• seed (default 7) - reseed for a different random dust/scratch layout.

You're not going to memorize all of them. Practical approach: set weave_x/weave_y to ~1 for a gentle rock, leave dust and scratches at defaults, nudge develop_* for density, and only push brightness_* high when you want it visibly strobe-y. The node previews most of this live, so dial it by eye.

Where it sits

It's one of the pack's "texture & era" VideoFX stages, grouped with Regrain, Frame Blend, Posterize, and Pseudocolor. A typical chain: generated clip → Old Film → (Regrain for film grain on top) → composite. Because these stages are snapshot-based, a change upstream means re-running this node - which is fine, it's one pass, but don't expect live updates downstream of a long FX chain.

Install

Same as every ComfyTV stage:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/jtydhr88/ComfyTV

Restart ComfyUI - on Desktop/macOS clone into the running instance by absolute path and verify custom_nodes/ComfyTV/__init__.py is at the top level. ComfyUI Manager finds it as "ComfyTV". No extra Python dependencies; the torch backend is ComfyUI's own.

One honest warning: "old film" looks great in moderation and instantly cheesy cranked to eleven. The artifacts this node generates are randomized per seed, so when you find a dust pattern you love, lock the seed and don't let control-after-generate randomize it away.