After Effects camera shake presets, and the wiggle way by hand

How do you add camera shake in After Effects without a plugin?

Put a wiggle expression on the Position of a Transform effect, on an adjustment layer above everything else. The whole frame shakes, and once you know the steps it takes a minute.

1. Add Layer › New › Adjustment Layer and keep it at the top of the stack. Trim it so it starts on the hit.
2. Apply Effect › Distort › Transform to that adjustment layer.
3. Alt-click (Option-click on a Mac) the stopwatch beside the Transform effect's Position and type wiggle(8, 20): eight wobbles a second, up to 20 pixels each way.
4. Set the Transform effect's Scale to about 105 so the edges of the frame never show. The other fix is Effect › Stylize › Motion Tile above the Transform, with Output Width and Height raised and Mirror Edges on.
5. For motion blur, untick Use Composition's Shutter Angle inside the Transform effect and set Shutter Angle to around 180.

A real hit fades out. Replace the expression with this and the shake starts at 40 pixels and dies to nothing over 0.6 seconds from the layer's in point:

amp = linear(time, inPoint, inPoint + 0.6, 40, 0);
wiggle(12, amp)

Prefer keyframes you can see? Window › Wiggler adds random keys between two keyframes you select, at the frequency and magnitude you type. In a 3D comp, parent the camera to a null and wiggle the null's Position instead, so the camera's own move stays clean.

Which After Effects camera shake presets are in mouzeclick's Motion lab?

Fourteen camera shakes and flickers, in the Shakes sub-tab of Motion lab, one section of the mouzeclick workspace for After Effects. In the order the panel lists them: Basic, Quick, Wave, Wave V2, Bounce in, Bounce out, Squeeze Y, Squeeze X, Warp, Lens, Invert, Invert Pixel, Dark flicker and White flicker.

Each preview plays on the mouzeclick mouse. That sounds odd, but it helps: you judge the movement on the same object every time, not on footage that is already moving. Three controls go with the previews:

• Speed and Strength sliders, so one preset covers a gentle wobble and a hard slam.
• Timing. The rig goes in at the playhead, or at the start of the comp.
• Flash. A tick box adds a flash with the shake, useful on a beat drop or an impact.

Motion lab is one of eleven sections in that panel; the all-in-one After Effects extension guide walks through the others.

How do you apply After Effects camera shake presets in mouzeclick?

Put the playhead on the hit, click previews until one feels right, set the sliders, and double-click it.

1. Open Window › Extensions › mouzeclick workspace. Motion lab is one of the three quick workspaces at the bottom of the panel, one click from anywhere.
2. Open the Shakes sub-tab.
3. Move the playhead to the frame where the impact lands: the punch, the bass hit, the cut.
4. Click a preview to watch it. Click others; nothing reaches your comp yet.
5. Set Speed and Strength, and tick the flash if you want one.
6. Double-click the preset. The rig goes in at the playhead (or at comp start, if you chose that).
7. Play it back in real time rather than scrubbing. A shake only reads at full speed.

Shakes stack badly. If you need two hits a second apart, add two short rigs rather than one long one with a strong setting; the gap between them is what makes each hit read. If you key a decay by hand, the curve on those keys matters as much as the numbers; the After Effects easing presets page covers that.

How strong and how fast should a camera shake be?

For a hit, go short and fast: 8 to 15 wobbles a second, 20 to 40 pixels on a 1920×1080 frame, gone within half a second. For handheld, go slow and small: 1 to 3 wobbles a second and 5 to 10 pixels, running for the whole shot.

These are starting numbers from my own timelines, not rules. A few things move them:

• Resolution. Pixel values are per comp. In a 3840×2160 comp, double them to get the same feel.
• Screen size. A phone-first 9:16 edit is watched small, so you can push strength a little. A cinema or TV edit needs less.
• Rotation. Half a degree to two degrees of rotation wiggle next to the position wiggle makes a shake feel physical rather than digital.
• Music. Match the frequency to the track. At 120 BPM a beat is half a second, so a shake that dies in 12 frames at 25 fps fits inside one beat.

Type studio's Shake expression is the same idea on one property, with Frequency, Amplitude and Decay settings, so it dies away on its own. More on that in the After Effects expressions library.

Shake, handheld drift or flicker: which one do you need?

A shake is an impact, a drift is a camera operator breathing, and a flicker is light, not movement. Pick by what happened in the scene.

• Impact shake. Short, fast, decays. Motion lab's presets, or the Shake expression in Type studio on a property.
• Handheld drift. Slow and constant. Type studio has Handheld realistic and Camera drift; the panel suggests putting both on a camera layer. mouzecam, one of the 22 mouzeclick extensions, adds handheld drift to its camera rig, with push, orbit, crane, dolly zoom and whip moves.
• One layer, not the frame. mouzeaccent's Emphasis shake shakes a single layer, such as a price or a button, and taking it off keeps the layer's own expressions. Type studio's Jitter gives choppy micro-jumps.
• Flicker. Motion lab lists Dark flicker and White flicker next to the shakes. Preview both when you want a faulty light or a flash frame.

Need a shake that loops, for a background or a GIF? Type studio has a Loopable wiggle. By hand, this blends two wiggles so the end matches the start:

freq = 2; amp = 30; loopTime = 3;
t = time % loopTime;
w1 = wiggle(freq, amp, 1, 0.5, t);
w2 = wiggle(freq, amp, 1, 0.5, t - loopTime);
linear(t, 0, loopTime, w1, w2)

Why does my After Effects camera shake show black edges or look wrong?

Black edges mean the frame moved further than the picture. Most other problems come from where the shake sits.

• Black edges. Scale up 5 to 10 percent, lower the strength, or use Motion Tile with Mirror Edges.
• No motion blur. The Transform effect blurs on its own only when Use Composition's Shutter Angle is off and Shutter Angle is above zero.
• Only one layer shakes. The expression is on that layer. Move it to an adjustment layer above everything you want to shake.
• The shake starts in the wrong place. In Motion lab, check whether you added the rig at comp start instead of the playhead. By hand, check the layer's in point, since the decay counts from there.
• It looks digital. Add a little rotation wiggle and motion blur; pure position jitter with no blur reads as a glitch, not a camera.
• Expression error after a language switch. Expressions that name an effect in English can break in a non-English After Effects. mouzekit's rigs are written to work in any language.
• Previews crawl. Motion Tile and motion blur cost far more than the wiggle itself. Turn them off while you time the hit.

Can you get camera shake presets on a Mac?

Not Motion lab's 14: the mouzeclick workspaces are Windows only, and the Mac app does not include them. Several other shake tools do run on a Mac.

• mouzecam adds handheld drift to a camera rig.
• mouzekit has a Wiggle rig among its 28 tools; its settings stay in Effect Controls, ready to keyframe.
• mouzeexpr has Drift and Oscillate among its 24 ready-made expressions, with settings and Bake to turn them into keyframes.
• mouzerun starts with a Wiggle button among its six examples.
• The After Effects Tool wheel has a Loop, ping-pong, wiggle group, one flick away on F10.

And the wiggle expression above works the same on any computer. See what the Mac app includes before you choose.

Questions people ask

Keep reading