hand held shake effect

Crop into your footage slightly, create a null, parent your footage to this null (pickwhip), create an expression on the x and y values (on the null - press P twice to open up position values on the timeline/layers window) that basically wiggles the values [ wiggle(<number of pixels to wiggle by>,<frequency>); and play around.

Video Copilot uses this technique a lot, I'd say you have a 50/50 chance you'll randomly find a video where he uses the technique if you're at all unsure of what you're doing.

There are plugins you can also do this same function, they can be a bit more advanced too, like applying slight skew and distort by altering the clip in 3D space, and ones that emulate certain types of shake etc... Not sure what they're called but I'm sure a quick google of "after effects shake plugin" might come up with some results!
 
I'd go for wiggle expression, it's superfast and looks natural. It's often enough to just select the layer, press P to bring up position values, hold ALT key and click on the stopwatch sign of position to enter the wiggle expression. Something like - wiggle(2,5) - should look good but play around with both values (frequenzy,intensity). Like Calomile said you'll have to upscale the layer a bit.


In your example however, the camera pans to one side more than to the other and stays there for some time longer as well. You can add such (rather controlled) movement manually very fast as well.
Open the "motion sketch" window from the "windows" menu. Press "Capture" in the motion sketch window and start moving your footage layer around in the preview window with your mouse. Motion Sketch is recording the movement in realtime, but you can also adjust "capture speed" for slower or faster recording. After capturing the layer will move as you recorded. Again you'll have to upscale the layer depending on the intensity of your movements.
 
Last edited:
Another, reusable solution:

Record some actual footage while holding your camera. Track the motion, in the ACTUAL shaky footage and then apply that motion to your footage that you want to be shaky.

Real motion is always going to be more realistic than any sort of expression or guess work.
 
I'll second the above. Good call on that. The wiggler and the likes of those effects are either (a) too perfect of motion or (b) too jarring. Handheld motion is sporadic. Sometimes there's no motion, sometimes a little, but it's not the same constant motion throughout.
 
Take your time, and do a really good track. You can save the project somewhere and whenever you need to fake a handheld shot, just pull it up.

Oh, or you can track it in mocha, and save the tracking data as a text file (I believe).
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top