Video effects, and every amount automatable

Colour, focus, texture and transform effects that all preview live on the phone, plus twelve transitions. Any effect amount can be keyframed across a clip, which is what turns a slider into a move.

The one thing to know first

Every effect below has an amount, and every amount can be keyframed across the clip. Hold a clip, release without moving it, and choose Automation to open a lane where you set the amount at different points in the shot.

That single mechanism is what makes the list longer than it looks. Keyframed scale is a zoom. Keyframed position is a pan. A keyframed blur is a rack focus. A keyframed VHS amount is a signal getting worse across a shot.

Colour

The grade. Nine dials that move where the picture sits, from a small correction to a look.

Focus and movement

Softness, detail and the smear of a fast pan.

Texture

Things laid into the picture rather than corrections to it. All four run in canvas space, so they are the same size at 1080p and 4K.

Film grain

Grain is added to the finished frame rather than to the source. On a 4K clip landing on a 1080p canvas the source is averaged down two-to-one on the way in, which turns grain applied at source into a faint sheen, so it goes on last, where a grain of a given size means the same thing at every resolution.

Earthquake

The frame is thrown around by several oscillations at frequencies with no common factor, so the movement never repeats on a loop you can spot. It crops in by exactly the distance the frame can travel, which means an edge can never come into shot: the crop margin is the zoom. Its slider is labelled Violence, because “Earthquake” does not tell you what the one knob does.

VHS

The tape effect is described in full below, and there is a step-by-step guide to building a VHS look.

Transform

Where the frame sits inside the canvas. Every one of these keyframes, which is what makes a camera move out of a still clip.

Scale, Pos X and Pos Y are three separate entries rather than one transform control for a reason: each carries its own amount and its own automation curve, so you can zoom in across a shot while drifting sideways at a different rate. Keyframing those two together is a Ken Burns move on a still or a locked-off shot.

The VHS tape has twelve dials

The VHS effect is not a single overlay. It reproduces what the format did to a picture, and then schedules faults to arrive intermittently, because damage applied evenly to every frame reads as a filter, and tape does not do that. It plays fine, the tracking slips for a fifth of a second, it plays fine again.

Dial	What it does to the picture
Bandwidth	How much horizontal detail the format kept. Turn it down and the picture goes soft sideways while staying sharp vertically, which is the single thing that most says tape.
Colour bleed	Colour smearing sideways out of the edges it belongs to, and lagging behind the brightness it should sit on.
Ringing	The bright echo just after a hard edge, left by the recorder's own sharpening.
Tape noise	Speckle that swells and fades rather than sitting evenly on every frame. It is drawn inside the reduced bandwidth, so it is chunky the way tape noise actually is.
Scan lines	The horizontal line structure of the display. These belong to the screen, so they stay put when the picture rolls.
Head switch	The torn band along the very bottom of the frame where the video head changed over.
Dropout	Brief flashes where the tape lost contact and the picture had nothing to show.
Colour fringing	Red and blue pulling apart from each other at the edges of the frame.
Snow	Bursts of static across the picture.
Wobble	The picture breathing sideways, as though the tape is not quite running at a steady speed.
Tracking	Bands of misaligned picture drifting through the frame, the fault you used to fix with the tracking dial.
Roll	Vertical hold lost: the whole image travels up or down the screen and wraps, then snaps back when the hold catches.

Each dial is a multiplier on what the wear already gives you: 1 leaves it alone, 0 turns it off, 2 doubles it. Each is stored separately, so each keyframes on its own and a tracking fault can get steadily worse across a shot. And the schedule of faults is fixed per clip, so the same clip renders the same tape every time and the fault you watched in the monitor is the fault that exports.

Three VHS recipes to start from

Transitions

Twelve, set on the clip before the cut. Eleven are blends that split their duration across the join; the twelfth takes no time out of either clip at all.

The Glitch datamosh is the odd one out and has a page of its own: it is a real compression effect built from your two shots rather than artwork composited over them.

Audio effects

Applied per clip alongside volume, pan and fades. Everything except noise reduction and loudness matching plays live in the preview, so you hear a slider as you move it.

Ducking sits above all of this at the track level: it pulls one track down automatically whenever another is loud, which is how music drops under dialogue without keyframing the music by hand. How the tracks fit together.

Asking for an effect in words

Every effect in the catalogue can also be reached by typing or dictating it, in the words people actually use rather than the names in the list: “washed out”, “punchier”, “crush the blacks”, “out of focus”, “like an old tape”.

There are also named looks, which are stacks of the effects above applied together: cinematic, vintage, teal and orange, noir, faded, dreamy, warm, cool, punchy and film.

make it look cinematic
add a teal and orange look
make it noir
add a vignette to every clip
give it a VHS effect
zoom in slowly over the clip
add a shake effect
straighten the horizon

How natural-language editing works

Effects questions

Can effect amounts be animated over a clip?

Yes. Hold a clip, release without moving it, and choose Automation to open a lane where you keyframe an effect's amount across the clip. That is how a look builds through a shot rather than switching on at the cut, and it is also how a still clip becomes a camera move: keyframing scale and position is a zoom or a pan.

Do effects preview live, or only on export?

Video effects are drawn in the monitor while you adjust them, and audio effects play live so you hear a slider as you move it. Two audio processes (noise reduction and loudness matching) are applied on export only, because they need to analyse the whole clip.

Is the VHS effect a filter or a simulation?

It is closer to a simulation. Rather than one uniform overlay, it reproduces what the format actually did to a picture (reduced horizontal detail, colour bleeding sideways, ringing, scan lines and the head-switch tear), and then schedules faults such as dropout, tracking bands and lost vertical hold to arrive intermittently. Twelve separate dials control it, and each one keyframes.

What is the earthquake effect?

Earthquake throws the frame around with overlapping oscillations at frequencies that do not line up with each other, cropping in by exactly the distance the frame can travel so an edge never comes into shot. Its one slider is labelled Violence, and it keyframes, so a shake can build.

Do effects work at 4K?

Yes. The texture effects (vignette, film grain, VHS and earthquake) are applied to the finished frame rather than the source, so they are the same size relative to the picture at every resolution rather than shrinking to a faint sheen on a large canvas.

Put an effect on your own footage

Clip Smasher is free to download for iPhone and Android, and every effect is in the free version.

Free to download · iPhone and Android · No account · Works offline