Re: Video to ASCII effect

This expression is set up to use the most dense character to represent black (@) and the most open character for white (space). If you use white type on a black background your image will look inverted. To overcome this you could invert the order of the characters in the density variable or invert your sample image (and use black type on a white background)

I see some outlined characters in your image and extreme variation in the spacing.
I suggest you use a more ascii like character like courier or some typewriter font...

You can't seem to make out what is represented by the ascii art....
I had the same kind of results when I used a colour image.

I made a pre-comp with my video and boosted the contrast with the levels filter. I desaturated the video with the hue/saturation filter and to get a more predictable result I applied a posterize filter to bring it back to six levels of gray... in the main comp I inverted the colour of my pre-comp.

Did you get a chance to use my source file?