SHŌWA Studio: Retro Anime Emulator

Your anime, the way it was meant to look.

SHŌWA Studio takes a finished cut and runs it through everything 80s anime went through before anyone ever saw it. Cels shot on 35mm, a release print, a transfer to video, and then a LaserDisc, a TV broadcast, a rental VHS or the glow of a CRT. Older, not wrecked. You pick a look, see it on your own footage, and render.

This isn't a LUT or a grain overlay. I built every stage the way the real formats worked and in the order they happened, so the film softens before the tape does, the color bleeds off the line work where a VHS actually bled it, and the whole thing reacts to what's in your footage. Cuts get a splice and a jump in the print timing, flashes make the tube swell, and fast motion smears like it did on tape.

What it does:

• 9 looks: NIGHT SHIFT, 35MM PRINT, 16MM TV PRINT, LASERDISC, TV AIRING '88, TAPED OFF TV, RENTAL VHS, CRT and ARCADE RGB

• One AGE dial that takes any look from your original to twice as old

• Every stage is yours to tweak (timing, film, print, signal, tube and chroma), and you can save your own looks under your own names

• Compare as you go with a before/after slider, 1:1 and 200% zoom, and a 2-second motion preview

• Undo and redo anything (Cmd+Z / Ctrl+Z)

• Batch it: drop in a stack of clips and render them all in the same look

What you get:

• SHŌWA Studio for Mac (Apple Silicon and Intel) and Windows

• Renders at your video's own resolution, up to 4K, with your frame rate and audio kept

• ProRes (422 HQ, 422, LT, Proxy, 4444), DNxHR, MP4 (H.264 or HEVC), or 16-bit PNG and TIFF sequences

• Opens pretty much any video: H.264, HEVC phone clips, ProRes, DNxHR, VP9, AV1 and more

• Works offline. Nothing gets uploaded, it reads your video where it lives and saves the render right next to it

• One purchase works on 2 computers, activated with the email you buy with

• Updates download by themselves

Before you buy:

Mac needs macOS 11 or later, Windows needs Windows 10 or 11 (64-bit), and 16 GB of memory is recommended. Rendering runs on your processor, so long 4K clips take a while. On Windows, the first launch can show "Windows protected your PC": click More info, then Run anyway.

I built SHŌWA for my own anime reels first, and now you can run your own work through it. If you have any questions, email me through www.jboogxcreative.com and I'll help you out.

Built by @jboogxcreative.