Retro Video Text

RetroVideoText is the "put text on your footage and make it look like 1985" node. Default text is SYSTEM LOADING..., and that pretty much tells you the vibe: glowing terminal-style type, scanlines over the frame, and a bit of chromatic aberration on the letters. It stamps the text onto every image in your batch, so you can lay a retro title or HUD label across a video's worth of frames in one pass.

It's part of the pack's vintage-video corner (the same family as the VHS and interlaced nodes), and it's genuinely nice for opening titles, loading-screen mockups, or any "glowing green text over footage" aesthetic. No model, no font download required out of the box - just a solid default look with knobs.

How it works

Pure PIL drawing. It loads a font, draws your text onto a transparent layer, then builds up the look:

• Glow - the text is re-drawn in a ring around itself at low alpha, scaled by glow_radius and glow_intensity. That's your phosphor glow.
• Chromatic aberration - red and blue copies are offset left/right of the main text for that misaligned-CRT edge.
• Scanlines - a horizontal line pattern is overlaid across the whole image at scanline_spacing intervals, with scanline_alpha controlling how strong it is.

The text sits at top, center, or bottom (position), and the color comes from five presets: green, amber, white, cyan, magenta. Fonts load from the pack's TTF folder - the menu currently offers just default (a built-in PIL font), but if you drop font files into that folder they become available.

The inputs that matter

• text - what it says. SYSTEM LOADING... by default.
• position - top / center / bottom.
• text_color - the five presets. Green is the default and the most "terminal"; amber reads more "old alarm panel."
• font_size - 8 to 256. Bigger is bolder, obviously.
• glow_radius / glow_intensity - the neon halo. Radius 3, intensity 0.5 is tasteful; crank both for full 80s overload.
• scanline_spacing / scanline_alpha - the CRT line texture. Spacing 3, alpha 0.3 gives that classic visible-scanline look.
• chromatic_aberration - 0–10, the color-fringing offset in pixels. 2 is subtle, 8+ is "the tube is dying."

Output: one IMAGE, same batch size - the whole frame gets the scanlines, text on top.

Installing it

Part of DJZ-Nodes. ComfyUI Manager → Install Custom Nodes → search DJZ-Nodes → install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/MushroomFleet/DJZ-Nodes
cd DJZ-Nodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

It only needs PIL, which ComfyUI ships - none of the pack's heavy dependencies (OpenCV, audio, 3D) are involved. Custom fonts go in ComfyUI/custom_nodes/DJZ-Nodes/TTF/.

Common issues

The realistic gotchas are taste and fonts. On fonts: until you add files to TTF/, you only get default, which is a plain bitmap-style font - fine for the aesthetic, but if you expected Helvetica you'll be disappointed. On behavior: position controls the text's placement, but the scanlines cover the entire frame regardless of where the text is - if you only want scanlines under the text, this isn't the node for that (pair it with a crop/blend instead). And the glow draws outside the text box bounds, so a huge font_size with a big glow_radius can push past the frame edges on small canvases - leave a little margin. Otherwise it's one of the most foolproof nodes in the pack: type, pick a color, queue.