Block Crunch

Breaks the image into blocks like damaged digital video. A share of the blocks break: they slide or copy the block beside them, flatten into a few colors, and let their color slip out in larger blocks. The pattern changes Rate times a second. Blocks that don’t break are left exactly as they are.

Parameter	Control	Range	Notes
Amount	Trough	0 to 1	How many of the blocks break. 0 leaves the image unchanged. Default 0.3.
Blocks	Selector	8 px, 16 px, 32 px	Size of the blocks. Can be modulated. Default 16 px.
Shift	Trough	0 to 8	How far broken blocks slide, in blocks. Default 1.
Repeat	Trough	0 to 1	How many broken blocks copy the block to their left or above instead of sliding. Default 0.25.
Crush	Trough	0 to 1	Flattens broken blocks toward their own average color and down to a few shades. 0 leaves their colors alone. Default 0.5.
Chroma	Trough	0 to 1	Color slips out of broken blocks in larger blocks of its own. Default 0.3.
Rate	Trough	0 to 30 Hz	How many times per second the broken blocks change. 0 keeps them still. Can be shown as the time one change takes. Default 4 Hz.

Two Block Crunch effects break different blocks, even with the same settings. See-through parts of the image move with their blocks.

Perfect loops

With Perfect loop on, the pattern follows the loop clock, so it repeats every loop when Rate fits a whole number of changes into it. The loop check offers Snap when it does not.

Recipes

• Broken stream. Amount around 0.15, Shift 2, Crush 0.7 and Rate around 8 Hz for a feed that keeps glitching.
• Hits on the beat. Route an Envelope triggered by the kick to Amount, so blocks break on each hit and the picture clears in between.
• Smeared crunch. Put Block Crunch before Datamosh in the same chain: the broken blocks get dragged along with the movement.

Related: Insert FX Chains, Datamosh.