So you want to add camera shake to your next video, I’m gonna show you how to do it right within Alight Motion in this new Alight Motion tutorial.
I’m going to show you two different styles, of camera shake one is more of this earthquake sort of dramatic effect and the other is more of a handheld look, and I’m going to show you two ways to do that one so first with this more earthquake stylized effect this is created by an adjustment layer and the transform effect.
So I’ve got this basketball clip right here and if I drag this on to my timeline it’s a pretty smooth shot nothing’s really happening and I’ve added the camera shake, whenever the basketball hits the ground so first things first I want to create an adjustment layer and add that to track two so click new item and choose adjustment layer select okay and then just put it on top of your video track.
now I’m gonna zoom in here and you want to zoom in and have the adjustment layer, start right when the ball is hitting the ground and then maybe go for another seven or eight frames half a second or so and then, I’m just going to trim the end of this adjustment layer now adjustment layers, apply whatever effect is applied to that layer to everything beneath it and the reason we use adjustment layers is so that we can easily duplicate this camera shake effect to any clip or throughout this same clip go to your effects bin and type in transform, it should be under your distort properties and place that on the adjustment layer and the effects controls bin will now edit this effect notice though one thing is that you can’t apply this sort of movement and rotation effect.
we’re going to do just with the basic motion properties of an adjustment layer, see if I move this around or rescale it up or down nothing actually applies to this clip beneath it and that’s because only effects that are applied to this adjustment layer, are applied to this basketball layer and that’s what this transform effect is so if I move the position around see how I do this now this video clip is moved so the first thing I’m going to do is set a keyframe, for scale at the very beginning of this clip this is tellingAlight Motion that at this point we want the scale to be 100% and we create a keyframe by clicking this little time watch right here while you’re at it go ahead and create a keyframe for rotation position, as well then up here in the effects controls go to the very end of this clip and then create a new keyframe for each of these properties as well with this button add or remove keyframe so in between here we’re going to add some changes to create this effect but we want the beginning, and end of this adjustment layer to be at the normal settings so let’s go right here in the middle and we’re gonna do sort of like a zoom in zoom out and then rotate in rotate out so let’s scale it up to 115 and you’ll notice that when I put my timeline indicator right here in the middle and then I type in a new number for scale it adds a keyframe same for rotation let’s go to 2 so you can see this starting to work that it zooms in and then out zooms in and out now.
let’s just add some position animation, and this is just going to be moving it down moving it around this is just trying to make it feel a little bit more organic so maybe 5 or 6 keyframes in the middle here you might want to play around and that’s pretty good so let’s play through it nice so you could go in and tweak those to see if you want more or less shake the other thing I did with this original version, was I added a subtle bit of blur to it and that was with the directional blur so type in directional direct and you’ll see that the directional blur pops up we’re going to apply it to the adjustment, layer again we’re going to set keyframes at the beginning and end at 0 and 0 and then go to the end and apply these keyframes as well and then in the middle we’re going to create our blur so first I’m going to increase the blur length just so I can see what its gonna look like and then adjust the direction to something like 77 degrees or something and then.
I’m gonna bring back my blur length to 15 again it depends on how dramatic you want to be pretty cool huh neat so now the beauty of this is we can just go to the next spot where the ball bounces, right there and then copy and paste this adjustment layer or simply hold the option key down and drag this clip that’s on a Mac on a PC it would be can I believe alt clicking and dragging and we can just duplicate this camera shake over and over boom boom boom cool huh awesome so that’s more of that earthquake style.
let’s look at the handheld style I’m gonna show you two ways to do it one is basically the same thing with adjustment layer, so I’m actually not gonna walk through this entire sequence of what I did but you can see here that I’ve added this adjustment layer I’ve added the transform property and I’ve added position scale and rotation keyframes, the key is to be subtle so here you can see that there’s just the subtle movement it’s not like in the earthquake one and it’s very very minimal adjustments, to all of these different properties so that’s one way you can sort of custom manually do it but there’s an easier and more organic way to do it that I got from my buddy Curt Anderson over at Adobe masters so what we are going to need is a stable shot that we want to add motion to which is the street shot.
so I’m just going to duplicate, this over here see how there’s no motion at all and then
I’m going to need a shot that has motion so you do need that separate shot I can use this basketball shot and I’m just going to place it above this clip and I’m gonna, just make it the same length as that clip so see how this basketball shot has movement the camera movement already I’m basically going to use the warp stabiliser effect and reverse-engineer, it so it applying the movement that’s being removed from this shot to this shot okay I know that’s a little confusing but let’s just show you how to do it so if we go to our effects type in warp we find warp stabiliser put this on top of the basketball clip and now it’s going to analyze it and then we’re going to change some settings so we actually want to change the method here from subspace warp to position you can also try position scale, and rotation but I’ve found that position seems to work best for this handheld motion style for framing.
we’re gonna leave that stabilize crop and auto scale and then smoothness this will actually increase or decrease the amount of shake you have so the more smoothness the smoother, your footage is on this clip the shaky er it’s going to be on the street clip that I’m adding camera shake to so now if I play through this while there’s still movement it tries to do a little bit of stabilizing it doesn’t matter if there’s a if it’s stable or not because what I’m going to do is actually copy this warp stabiliser effect selecting it command C on a Mac that’d be control C on a PC I’m gonna move that basketball clip now notice what happens I play this clip nothing’s happening if I select this clip and then paste the warp stabiliser, effect notice how there is now movement so you get this more organic natural movement.
so if that’s a little bit too much movement, we can go in here let’s drop this down to like something like 10 percent copy this again go to this other clip oops not delete the clip but delete the effect and then paste it so now you see that’s a little bit less of hand movement now, this organic movement is going to depend on what clip we are using to add the warp stabilizer to so you can use different Clips to get different kinds of handheld movement but again this is a quick way to create that organic handheld motion without having to go through and manually keyframe it yourself.
well I hope you really enjoyed this too toriel and if you did please like and subscribe to the channel for more if you have any questions or comments, you can leave them below in the comments and if you’re looking to take your skills to the next level make sure you head over to video school where we have premium courses, more free tutorials and articles guides and all kinds of stuff that will help you become a better creator thanks so much for watching and have a beautiful day.
