CCTV Effect in Premiere Pro & DaVinci Resolve (or 1 Click)

Search for a CCTV effect and you will find long Premiere Pro and DaVinci Resolve tutorials — layer a grain, stack a scanline overlay, keyframe a timestamp. They work. They also take twenty minutes for a shot that is on screen for four seconds. Here is the honest version of both, plus the exact settings if you would rather have the shot now and get back to editing.

What actually makes footage read as surveillance

A security-camera look is not one effect, it is four traits arriving together. Miss one and the shot reads as "old video" instead of "camera in the corner of a car park".

• Colour is nearly gone. Most fixed cameras run washed-out or switch to infrared at night. Heavy desaturation with a slight warm or green cast sells it faster than full black and white.
• The frame rate is low and uneven. This is the trait people forget, and it is the one that convinces. Recorders often store 6-12 fps to save disk, so motion stutters instead of flowing.
• The sensor is cheap. Visible noise in the shadows, soft detail, scanlines, and a little chroma smear around edges.
• Something is burned in. A timestamp, a camera number, sometimes a REC dot — drawn by the recorder, so it never moves with the scene.

How to do it in DaVinci Resolve

Resolve gets you most of the way with stock ResolveFX, all on the Color page:

1. Kill the colour. Drop saturation to roughly 10-20% in the colour wheels, then push a slight tint — cool green for daylight cameras, warm grey for indoor ones.
2. Add the damage. ResolveFX Texture > Analog Damage is the workhorse: it carries scanlines, noise, and signal wobble in one node, and its presets get you close before you tune.
3. Soften the sensor. A touch of blur plus ResolveFX Texture > Film Grain keeps it from looking too clean and modern.
4. Burn in the timestamp. A Text+ node on the Edit or Fusion page, monospaced, top or bottom corner, no drop shadow.
5. The frame rate. This is where Resolve is genuinely fiddly — there is no single "shoot at 8 fps" control. You either retime the clip in the inspector with frame interpolation set to Nearest, or build it in Fusion. Budget time for this step.

How to do it in Premiere Pro

Premiere has one advantage here: the frame-rate trick is a built-in effect rather than a comp.

1. Lumetri Color — saturation down near zero, lift the blacks slightly so shadows go milky, and add a small tint.
2. Video Effects > Time > Posterize Time — set it to 8 or 10 fps. This single effect does more for believability than any overlay.
3. Noise — 8-15% of the Noise effect, with "Use Colour Noise" off so it reads as sensor grain.
4. Timecode — Premiere ships a Timecode effect that renders a running clock, which saves keyframing a date by hand.
5. Scanlines — Premiere has no native scanline generator, so this is where most tutorials tell you to download an overlay clip and set it to Screen.

Both routes give you full control and a render at the end. If you are already in a project with graded footage around it, staying in your editor is the right call.

The one-click version, and the exact settings

If the shot is a quick insert — a reel, a horror short, a title card — the setup cost is the whole cost. This is the same look in a browser tab, with no install and no overlay files to source. It runs on your own device; nothing is uploaded.

The knob worth understanding is Frame Rate (choppy): it holds each frame instead of blending, which is exactly what Posterize Time does in Premiere and what Resolve makes you build by hand. At 45 it lands around 8-10 fps. Push it past 70 and you are in stop-motion territory, which reads as broken rather than surveilled.

Grayscale at 70 rather than 100 is deliberate too — leaving a trace of colour keeps the shot looking like a cheap sensor instead of a black-and-white filter.

Which one to use

Stay in Premiere or Resolve when the CCTV shot has to match a graded sequence, when you need the effect to change over the length of a long take, or when the project has to stay in one timeline for a client. Use the browser version when the shot is short, when you want to try six variations in the time one Analog Damage node takes to render, or when you are working on a machine that does not have the software on it.

They are not really competing. One is a room in your edit suite; the other is a shortcut for when you only need the one shot.

If you want the look without the tool comparison, the full CCTV surveillance walkthrough covers filming tips and the found-footage angle, and analog horror effects pairs the same dead-signal treatment with a story.

FAQ