Tutorial 146: Noice Noise

Joe Clay | Oct 19, 2018

This week, we're going to explore making new noises using camera sensors. When you generate noise inside of After Effects it's' either all very uniform or patchy. You can make better noise in AE, but what's even better and faster is to use your camera to record with the lens covered. All camera sensors have some inherent noise, and recording blackness makes it easy to bring it out. Use a levels or curves adjustment and go to town.

By using a bunch of different cameras, even different copies of the same camera, we can get interesting noises to use in our animations.

I didn't go over some of the examples as this is really about making the noise, but they basically use Displacement Map pointed at the noise. The one that shifts colors has Displacement Map on an adjustment layer with a blending mode of Hue instead of Normal. I do explain the grainy glow technique, and I hadn't found it when I recorded, but it came from this tweet from @shabello23:

There's a lot of different things you can do with noise, so having another way to make noise can be really helpful. Never forget that you can use your camera—even your cell phone—to make all sorts of interesting stuff to use.

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