How to add realistic camera shake in After Effects – Crate’s Camera Shake

Download Crate’s Camera Shake script here (Available for Pro Members)

There’s something unnatural about the well-known wiggle expression. It’s fair to say that this sort of shake is too perfect.

If you watch over a hand-held video recording, you’ll be quick to notice the immense differences between handheld footage and the go-to wiggle expression.

Add Realistic Camera Shake to your Video

While the wiggle expression does create a shake, it’s mathematical, where it smoothly interpolates randomly generated keyframes between intervals of time. In the real world, camera shake has a huge range of factors that can influence it: footsteps, wind, and weight of the camera are just a few!

This is why we have created our After Effects script, Crate’s Camera Shake!

The toolkit can create a fully-realistic camera shake with only the click of a button.

It’s fast, fully customisable, and is packed with features. So how does it work?

We’ve tracked and analyzed several different pieces of footage, all recorded in different scenarios. Earthquakes, running, handheld and more are all part of the bundle to choose from. Once you browse the built-in library of shake presets, you can then apply it directly to your footage. It’s that simple!

If you’re seeking more control, we’ve also included a variety of customisable options to perfect your shake.

Add Realistic Camera Shake to your Video

 

Amplitude – The strength of the shake.

Frequency – The speed of the shake.

Skip Keys – Reduce the density of keyframes (a value of 2 will place a keyframe every 3 frames instead of 1).

Random Seed – Add more unique randomness to your shake.

Motion Blur – Have the script automatically set up motion blur to the shake.

Auto Scale – The script will calculate the perfect size for your footage so that the shake does not have it drift out of frame.

 

We’ve also implemented a Jolt for you to choreograph your perfect set of shakes. The Jolt will be applied wherever your timeline scrubber is on your timeline. You can generate a null with the shake or apply directly to your layer.

These can be applied directly into the shake animation wherever you need, and give an impact to your footage. Jolts are perfect for explosions, impactful footsteps, or something rushing past the camera.

Add Realistic Camera Shake to your Video

Crate’s Camera Shake After Effects Script is exclusive for our Pro Users. The Pro Content continues to grow rapidly, sign up today!

We’ll be using this script in nearly every video we create and know you’ll find it as useful as we do.

Want to check out our other scripts? See them here

Interview with Nathan Dodson – Tutvid

Click here to visit Tutvid’s YouTube channel.

 

Nathan, dude, 773k subscribers?! Every time I check your channel it’s grown immensely, 1 Million is around the corner! What’s something that’s worked well and something that hasn’t for growing TutVid?

I went through a period of about 6 years where I grew very complacent with the company and what I wanted to do with tutvid and nearly lost everything I had built before that. Not working on my company was the biggest thing that didn’t “work” for growing tutvid.

Maintaining awareness of the industry and always being critical of and willing to change what I am doing has been a massive factor of success thus far. Also, creating content consistently is important.

I think for current-day content creators on a platform like YouTube, you must not only create content consistently, but also be able to create the kind of content that is useful, impactful, is shareable, and is engaging. If you create boring content or useless boring content day after day, you’ll never grow.

I’m self-taught, and so is Adrian. We owe most of our expertise to those who teach online (especially YouTube) so thanks for making such informative tutorials. Why did you decide to teach digital media on TutVid?

I was frustrated when I first started to use Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator that most of the tutorials that were available (back in 2006-07) were either very boring or left out vital details.
I bought a microphone and screen recorder one day and decided to make a crack at recording my own video tutorials (nearly none of them in 2007) and ended up putting them on YouTube and the rest has been history.

We’ve been making tutorials for a while but just recently found a style that works best for us. What’s your workflow like for making a tutorial? 

I have a list of ideas and images that I’d like to create tutorials about and I pick something that I like (or sometimes a trend will dictate a video or even the analytics will show that a certain type of videos resonates well with the audience) and begin playing in Photoshop to figure out how I would do it.
I then draft a rough series of notes to reference while recording and sit down and record my screen and audio and work through whatever the subject of the tutorial is.
After that, it’s a matter of post-production, graphics creation, social media, web, and email distribution, uploading to YouTube, Facebook, etc… and trying to share some behind the scenes stuff along the way.
It’s a big process that I’m still working on perfecting.

What’s your day to day work-life like? 

Work, email, research, making videos, each working portion of the day is very different depending on what we’re working on so this segment varies greatly day-to-day.
My morning and evening routines are usually pretty much the same, it’s the big chunk in the middle of the day that is always different.
One notable thing is that I only check my email once a day. It’s too much of a distraction and people who need to get a hold of me (clients or family) have my phone number and can call or text if something urgent arises.

Here’s some shameless self-promotion, what’s your favorite ProductionCrate content? 

I love so much of what you have to offer in the Motion Graphics portion of ProductionCrate. The transitions would have to be my current favorite. So much good stuff, though.

How to add Snow to your videos – VFX Tutorial

Download HD snow effects for your videos here

With only a few days to go until Christmas takes over, it’s time to go over one of the most fundamental uses of VFX compositing – snow!

Whether you’re shooting a Christmas comedy or a reflective and chilling scene for your film, snow can always help add value to your project. But not everyone has access to weather manipulating machines or industrially sized snow cannons, and so in these cases, we must rely on VFX to composite the snow into our footage.

FootageCrate has a huge library of snowfall effects, ranging from realistic to cartoon styled. Similar to all of our content, these snow effects are pre-keyed, meaning that transparency is preserved when you drop the snow footage on top of your shot without any further hassle! You can take a look at our collection of snow effects here.

Let’s get started with the tutorial! You can use almost any software for this, including After Effects, Hitfilm, Nuke and Premiere Pro!

I’ve taken this stock image from Pexels.com, so if you want to follow along, be my guest and download the image.

How to composite snow VFX into your video tutorial

One step I’ve often seen people skipping is that they don’t add depth to their snow effect. What I mean by this is that it’s quite clearly visible that there’s just a snow effect simply being placed on the footage, giving it a “flat” feel. We’re going to give the snow volume by first creating a solid that matches the colour of the lighter clouds, and making it so that the further away the footage is, the higher the opacity. This can be done through masking or opacity painting.

How to composite snow VFX into your video tutorial

Already we’ve given a nice volumetric feel to the scene. This will look like snow that is too distant to be seen by the camera individually, and so appears like a cloud.

We can now mask out or rotoscope the foreground so that it doesn’t sit behind this fog.

It’s now time to drop the snow effect into our video. I’ve taken two different effects from the FootageCrate website, which is the “snow background” and the “slow snow falling”. I’ll have the first placed behind the foreground, and the second in front of it. This makes it appear as if the subject is sandwiched between the two snow assets so that they feel part of the scene!

How to composite snow VFX into your video tutorial

Apply these snow effects with an add/lighten/screen transfer mode so that the dark halos around the snowflakes are invisible, and admire your now far more chilling scene! You can add further colour corrections to then cool the image with bluish tints.

How to composite snow VFX into your video tutorial

Thanks for reading this tutorial! If you’d like to learn more VFX, take a look at our helicopter compositing tutorial!

 

Download Christmas and Winter Holiday Video Effects!

Download HD Christmas and Winter Holiday video effects here!

Find Christmas and Holiday themed sounds and Music here!

Happy Holidays!

ProductionCrate is here to help you celebrate the season with some festive and fun video effects for your projects. Here’s a peek at some of the wonderful assets we have wrapped up for you.

Snow Effect Overlays

Edit in our looping snow effects with no time at all thanks to it all being pre-keyed. Our snowfall assets range from realistic blizzards to gentle cartoon snow. You can edit these snow effects into Premiere Pro and any other editing suite.

Download snow video effects for your video

Transitions

Give your video cuts a merry makeover with our animated Christmas themed transitions. ranging from snowmen, Christmas trees, gifts and more. Place these effects over two clips at the point where they cut in an editor such as Premiere Pro or After Effects.

Download Christmas themed video transitions

Backgrounds

Use an exciting Christmas backdrop for your greenscreens or presentations. We’ve made sure that these backgrounds loop, meaning you can have them endlessly play without any visible seams or cuts where the footage repeats itself.

Download Christmas themed video backgrounds

We hope you enjoy editing your festive videos over the holidays!

Download 4K Flag Backgrounds and Assets

Download 4K Flag backgrounds here

We’re giving you the chance to download one of our dozens of premium waving flag videos.

What makes this footage special, is not only is it 4K, but it loops!

Download HD Looping Flag Backgrounds

This means you can have the footage repeat itself without any visible jumping cuts or fades, giving the possibility to play the video for hours!

These flag effects are perfect for country presentations, patriotic videos and perfect backgrounds for your content.

Our full range of country flags includes:

  • Australian Flag
  • Bangladeshian Flag
  • Brazilian Flag
  • Canadian Flag
  • Chinese Flag
  • Danish Flag
  • Finnish Flag
  • French Flag
  • German Flag
  • Great British Flag
  • Indian Flag
  • Indonesian Flag
  • Italian Flag
  • Japanese Flag
  • Malaysian Flag
  • Maltese flag
  • Mexican Flag
  • New Zealand Flag
  • Nigerian Flag
  • North Korean Flag
  • Norwegian Flag
  • Pakistani Flag
  • Flag of the Philippines
  • Russian Flag
  • Singaporean Flag
  • South African Flag
  • South Korean Flag
  • Spanish Flag
  • Swedish Flag
  • Taiwan Flag
  • Turkish Flag
  • USA Flag

If a flag you need is missing from our library, and you would like to download it, write a comment below or send a message to support@productioncrate.com! We would love to hear from you.

Download HD Looping American USA Flag Backgrounds

Interested in becoming a part of our growing community? Take a look at our forums!

Crate Forums – Learn, Share, Connect

Join the new ProductionCrate Forum today!

Here you can showcase your work, find answers to your technical questions and talk with the community.

The Forums are the newest addition to the many resources ProductionCrate has to offer. We want to help connect video and filmmakers from around the globe and keep this insanely awesome community growing.

If you have any questions or issues while using the Forums make sure to email us at support@productioncrate.com

 

 

Download HDRI Maps for your 3D Projects

Download 8K HDRI maps here.

Say hello to your new source of specialist HDRI environment maps!

GraphicsCrate has widened its ever-expanding library of assets for visual artists by releasing over 25 HDRI maps, all ready to download. Our CG approach to creating these meant we are able to provide an exclusive range of environments unlike any other, such as space, oceans and at cloud-level.

Download HDRI Maps for your 3D Projects

We’ve also ensured that all of these have an un-clipped high dynamic range, meaning you can drop these into your 3D scenes and get the perfect lighting instantly.

These graphics are unlike any other, giving you the power to realistically light a spacecraft orbiting Earth, or even an aircraft mid-flight.

Download HDRI Maps for your 3D Projects

Our 8K resolution maps allow them to be used directly as backgrounds in your 3D projects without any further compositing.

Once downloaded, it’s yours forever! You can use it in games, 3D rendering and compositing to create the perfect look for your scene.

Download HDRI Maps for your 3D Projects

These textures are in .hdr format, which is compatible with most industry standard software such as 3ds Max, Cinema4D, Maya and Houdini, meaning you will never have to go through the hassle of converting to another file format.

Need even more 3D content? Discover our road materials here!

 

5 New Thriller Tracks!

We have updated our Thriller Music category with 5 new tracks!

 

Hacker (Pro)

Time is running out, your hero has only a small window to hack into the mainframe, but security knows someone has broken into the building. Will he be able to get the documents onto the zip drive before he is caught?

 

No Release (Free)

This track gives you the feeling of being watched, but you don’t know from where. Keep moving, you never know how close they are.

 

Unseen Forces (Free)

Syncopated sounds keep you on edge in this track, there is no mystery any more, just the fear of the unavoidable.

 

Invisible Waves (Pro)

There is no obvious rhythm or beat in this track, it has an ominous tone, perfect for the abandoned laboratory or underground bunker scene!

 

Quiet Night (Pro)

This track has more of a haunting tone, and could fit in just as easily in our Suspense Category as our Thriller.


Looking for Epic Tracks, we got you covered! Check these out