if you've watched a lot of youtube videos then you've probably come across the earthquake or
shake effect it's a popular technique used to signal confusion irritation or downright
anger now if you edit with final cut pro then you are in luck the earthquake effect
is built right in not so in imovie but don't you worry i'm going to show you a simple
straightforward way to create the earthquake or shake effect using imovie's built-in tools
let's jump in here we are in imovie this is imovie version 10.3.1 and i have this clip in
the timeline that i'm going to use to demonstrate how to create imovie's version of the earthquake
effect so the first thing i'm going to do is find the spot where i want to add the earthquake
effect and to help me do that i'm going to turn on a couple of imovie settings the first setting
is audio waveforms audio waveforms allow me to see my audio in the timeline so to activate
audio waveforms i'll go over to the top right of the timeline and select the settings button
and in the settings panel i'll go down to audio and check the box beside show waveforms and a
track appears below my video clip showing a jagged light blue pattern that's the waveform a visual
representation of my audio so now looking at the waveform i can see the pauses in my dialog which
are represented by gaps in the waveform another setting that's really helpful for editing audio
in imovie is audio skimming to activate audio skimming i'll go up to the top menu and select
view and from the drop down menu select audio skimming now you'll know it's activated if
there's a check mark beside it you can also turn on audio skimming using the keyboard shortcut
shift s with audio skimming on when i go down and scrub through the timeline i can hear the audio
which helps me find the spot where i want to edit so i'm going to add the earthquake effect
right here where i exclaim why "why" so what i'm going to do is scrub to just before i say
why and then i'll hit the keyboard shortcut command b to split the clip at that spot
then i'll go right to after i say why hit command b again to split the clip and now
i've isolated the section where i want to add the earthquake effect i'm going to zoom into my clip
on the timeline by holding down the command key and tapping on the plus key a few times you can
also use this slider over here to zoom into the timeline the next thing i need to do is
make the clip that i want to add the earthquake effect to an overlay but to make this clip an
overlay i need to put another clip underneath it you'll see why in just a second so i'm going
to go up above the browser window and select the backgrounds button then grab the black background
and drag it and place it right before my clip then i'll grab the clip that i want to put the
earthquake effect on and place it on top of the black background clip then i'll trim the black
background to match the length of my clip now this clip is an overlay so why did i do that
because to add the earthquake effect to this clip i'm going to animate it using keyframes and you
can only use keyframes with overlays specifically a picture-in-picture overlay so i'll select my
clip then go up to the toolbar above the preview window and select the video overlays button then
go to the left of the overlays interface and select the button that says cutaway and from the
drop down menu select picture in picture that causes my clip to shrink down and now it has
these blue corner handles around it and we can see the black background that i dropped in behind it
over in the top left of the preview window is the keyframe tool but before i get to that
when you turn your clip into a picture-in-picture overlay it sometimes defaults to fading on and off
now you probably don't want that for the earthquake effect you can get rid of that fade
by setting the dissolve setting up here to zero seconds then the clip will just cut in and cut out
all right let's animate this earthquake effect so first i'll make sure the playhead is placed
right at the first frame of the clip that i want to animate it's very important that you do that
then in the preview window i'll click and drag on the handles around the clip to size it up so that
it's slightly larger than the preview window then i'll center it up then i'll go up to the
keyframe tool and select this little diamond symbol with a plus sign in the middle of it
and click on it to add a new keyframe at the current playhead position then i'm going to
hit the forward arrow key on my keyboard two times to move the playhead forward two frames
then i'll click and drag on my clip in the preview window and move it over slightly now
i find the snapping function in the preview window can get in my way when i do this so i
like to disable the automatic snapping by holding down the command key as i click and drag the clip
now notice the keyframe tool when i let go of the clip it changes to a diamond symbol with a little
x in the corner of it this means a keyframe has automatically been placed for the clip's
new position if you want to get rid of that keyframe just click the little diamond symbol
i'll move forward on the timeline another two frames using the forward arrow key on my keyboard
then again while holding down the command key i'll click and drag the clip in the preview
window over slightly i think you see where i'm going with this i'll continue this process
until the end of the clip a little tip the more you move or displace the clip between keyframes
in the preview window the more pronounced the shake will be
okay i'm done keyframing let's see what this looks like
"...sound why! in this day and age" and there's the earthquake or camera shake effect
now if you really want to make it stand out you can select the clip
go up to the toolbar above the preview window and select the clip filter and audio effects button
and go over to the left and select the button that says none and out pops the
clip filter menu panel where you can choose from a bunch of different filter effects
i'll choose black and white for this demo now i can adjust the intensity of the filter using
the slider to the right of the clip filter menu button then i'll go over and select the audio
effects button and from the menu select one of my favorites pitch down 1 let's play this back
"...sound why! in this day and age" another thing you can do with this effect is play around with
the number of frames you put in between each keyframe so for example using a one
frame increment will make the shake effect look really sharp where using three or
more frames in between each keyframe will give the shake effect a bit of motion blur
and yes this technique can be a bit time consuming depending on the length of your
clip you probably want to keep the shake effect pretty short anyway because if it goes on too long
it starts to lose its impact and gets annoying this is definitely a case of less is more