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CAMERA SHAKE

Add simulated, realistic camera motion blur to your footage to emulate a simple wiggle or a violent earthquake.

Presets

Get your live-action effect off to a quick, stable start with Camera Shake's seven convenient presets. Find them via the blue Open Dashboard... button or the Choose a Preset... button below it.

As with all other Universe tools, you can modify or create a Camera Shake look and then save it under its own name by pressing the Save Preset... button.

Modify the Effect

• Shake Amount sets how much each shake knocks the image off from its center.
• Frequency adjusts the number of shakes exhibited in a given time period. You may find it most advantageous to adjust Shake Amount and Frequency in tandem. The below clips give a relative sense of these controls' impact on your comp. At left, we have the original clip with both parameters set to zero. The center image shows Camera Shake's default values of Shake Amount: 100 and Frequency: 1.0. At right, we step up to 175 and 4, respectively.
  
• Scale Footage changes the footage size to accommodate movement shifts. Camera Shake will mirror your footage rather than cover scaled-down edges with black borders. Expect this sort of possible result from low values (such as the 50 shown here):
  
• Shake Controls
  • Amplitude X/Y controls the maximum shake distance along the x and y axes. Keep in mind that higher values may shake your image partially or completely out of the comp frame.
  • Shake Complexity adds more detailed "jiggle" to your shaking. Higher values create more jiggle.
  • Maximum Rotation adds a spin element to your x/y shaking. This is another one of those controls where it's easy to go overboard in your enthusiasm.
    
    
  • Random Seed establishes a beginning, randomized value from which subsequent effects are generated. Keeping the same seed will yield a similar or same effect upon regeneration.
• Crop Settings
  • Tile Edges is enabled by default (shown left, below). This produces that aforementioned edge mirroring when you scale down images. Unchecking this box (right) eliminates the mirroring but leaves black edges.
    
    
  • Crop Edges can zoom in on the central image as the Crop Edges value decreases.
  • Expand Edge also eliminates edge mirroring when you reduce its value to 0 percent. If you've lowered Scale Footage to values under 100, Expand Edge can fill in those black bar gaps, albeit with edge mirroring.
• Motion Blur Group: To create a smoother, more realistic Camera Shake effect, the Motion Blur controls simulate the low shutter speed blur and frame blending commonly seen in film.
  • To enable the motion blur effect, twirl down the Motion Blur control group and select one of the Low, Medium, or High options.
  • Increasing the Shutter Angle control adds motion blur on the footage since it mimics a longer frame exposure. The following images compare having the Motion Blur Amount set to Off (left) with High and a Shutter Angle of 720 (right).
    
  • The Shutter Phase slider synchronizes or desynchronizes the timing of the shutter opening and closing with the frame rate of the footage.