• Log in / create account

 

• Article
• Discussion
• Edit
• History

From PlugInFinder

The Stats

• Developer: Scott Frizzle
• Host Application: Adobe After Effects
• View Quicktime

Download Quaker

• Quaker

Description

Quaker is a filter favorite for Adobe After effects 6 (or animation preset for AE 6.5) that assists in the creation of camera shake and earthquake effects on full screen clips. I concocted Quaker because I was too cheap to upgrade an old earthquake plug-in that I used to have. The main advantage of using Quaker for this type of effect is that it uses After Effects Motion Tile effect to tile your layer and create mirror edges, so that you don't see the edge of the clip as you would if you simply applied position or anchor point keyframes (see images.) Another nice feature is Quakers ability to simulate motion in three dimensions.

To use Quaker in AE 6, select the layer you wish to affect, and go to Effect>Apply Favorite. Find Quaker on your hard drive and select it (I recommend you put it in the Adobe After Effects>filter favorites folder, that way it will always appear in your filter favorites menu.) In AE 6.5, select the layer you wish to affect, and go to Animation>Apply Animation Preset. Find Quaker on your hard drive and select it (I recommend you put it in the Adobe After Effects>Presets folder, that way it will always appear in your Animation Presets menu.) Your layer will now have 3 effects applied to it along with some expressions to tie everything together. There is one slider that controls the Quake Magnitude, and another that controls the Quake Frequency. The third effect is After Effects own Motion Tile, which is what is creating the motion and the corresponding motion blur. Be sure to enable motion blur for the layer your are affecting, and turn on the motion blur switch in your comp so you can see the blur. I find that a shutter angle setting of 360 produces good motion blur results, but you can increase or decrease this to your taste.

Each property can be keyframed like any other effect. For most effects all you will need to do is adjust the Quake Magnitude and Quake Frequency sliders. The default settings create a fairly substantial constant earthquake effect, but by altering/ keyframing the Magnitude and Frequency settings it's easy to create a variety of other effects like camera bumps, handheld camera effects and earthquakes that build and fade away.

While the "mirror edges effect of Motion Tile does a pretty good job of creating the illusion that your image continues past the edges of the screen, there are limitations to how convincing this effect will be on certain footage. High magnitude settings will sometimes make the tiling of the image obvious. For instance, if you wanted to use Quaker on a clip of a news anchor, you wouldn't want to see his/ her head repeat at the top of the screen, so you would want to limit the Magnitude settings accordingly.

Quaker will work on non- full screen layers as well, but the image tiling might present a problem. If you wish to avoid the image tiling, create a comp which contains the layer you want to quake and make sure the comp's dimensions are significantly larger than the comp where you're going to do the quaking. Bring this comp into your main comp and apply Quaker to it. If you still see the image tiling on the edges of the screen, increase the dimensions of the first comp until you can't see the tiling any more.

When using Quaker on live action clips or other footage captured from tape, you may notice that the black edges that occur on clips of this type are troublesome. In these cases scale the clip up slightly so that the black edge is out of frame, precompose the clip, and then apply Quaker.

Quaker is free, of course, but I do request that if you find it useful in a real project, drop me a line and send me a sample of your work just for kicks.

Enjoy!