Intro
In today's video, I'm showing you how to create five new music video effects inspired by music videos from my favorite artist. A special thanks to our friends over at Envato Elements for sponsoring today's video. You can use my link below to get seven days free of unlimited assets for your next video project. All right, let's go ahead and jump on in.
The first effect is this distorted echo effect and it's inspired by my new favorite artist Lizzie McAlpine in her most recent video Ceilings.
Dropped Frames Echo FX
There's a couple shots here inside the video where it starts to build up and then it cuts to this darker scene where everything seems like there's dropped frames almost like you can't really believe what's going on in this shot. So let's recreate this just using effects built in Premiere Pro. Alright so here's this nice clip of these gals dancing on the beach. Let's make it look messed up. So the first step is going to effects and searching for posterize or posterize time. Double click to apply it. When we go to effect controls you can see the frame rate is 24 frames per second. When we play it back it still looks normal. But if we drop this way down to like 4. Now when we play it back it looks really distorted and stuttering because we dropped the frame rate down. But this is just the first step.
So the next step is to duplicate this clip. Press option or alt on a PC and click and drag and let go of that key so it's duplicated. From here what we can do is we can first drop the opacity down slightly and then use the position controls to slightly move this off. So it kind of creates that echo effect just a subtle amount. And next we can duplicate this one more time and then we can use the position to further bring it out slightly. So now it's starting to look more distorted. One more thing that we can do on the bottom layer is go to effects and search for Gaussian blur. Double click to apply it. Go to effect controls and we can increase the blurriness of the bottom layer here slightly. And same thing we can copy this command C and paste it on the second clip. So we have a little bit more blurriness going on. But the top layer we will keep without a Gaussian blur because that's the very top layer and we want that to be in focus. So you can play around with the location the position of where you want these echo trails to be. It doesn't have to be neatly stacked next to each other. It can kind of be overlapping. So now that I've played around with the position let's go ahead and press enter and return and let's see the final result. All right. It's definitely given me that distorted vibe. All right. So just by using the posterized time lowering the opacity and changing the position as well as a little bit of Gaussian blur we got the distorted effect. This next effect is a prism double exposure effect.
Prism Double Exposure
So here in the golden hour music video I love this song. This shot right here you can see it's duplicated the video clip and lower the opacity of one of the duplications. So let me show you how it works here in Premiere Pro. I have the stock video clip of the singer. All we need to do is press option or alt on a windows and click and drag just like we did before. And then on this clip we can adjust the position and then lower the opacity so then we can bring this over. So we have our duplicate over here looking a little bit darker in the bottom clip. We can scale this up slightly and bring it over. So we have this kind of double faced double exposure look going on just the same that they did here. So you can play around with the scale and the opacity of either clip to create a very nice prism double exposure effect and it just takes a couple of seconds to do.
Elements
So as you saw I was using stock video clips from Elements. But my favorite part about Elements is that it has far more than just stock footage. It has video templates, it has music, sound effects, graphics templates and much more. For example let's say you want to find some templates with some music video effects. Here there is this really cool music video freeze frame effect. So if we hover over this we can get a preview of what it looks like. And there's the freeze frame with an introduction. This is also a popular effect and this template here is for After Effects. You can go ahead and download that and use it in any type of project that you want. It's not limited to just personal projects. You can use it in your client projects and commercials, whatever you want. Let's go check out some more. Down here you can see that there's some digital video effects, kind of glitches that you can overlay on your videos. Down here there's some more flicker glitch effects. This one's for Final Cut Pro. And by the way you can choose which application you use over here. So if you only use Premiere Pro for example you can check that and it will show you what effects are available for that particular software. There's even trippy film effects. Look at this. Really really cool and you don't need to learn anything about the effects. You just download the template and replace your media and it's done. Elements pretty much has anything you need for any type of project. So you can use my affiliate link below that will get you 7 days free so you can go ahead and check it out to see if it has assets that you would use. And if it's a platform that you would actually find useful to your workflow. Alright thanks Elements for sponsoring and now let's jump back into the music video effects. So this next music video effect was inspired by Lil Nas X's Late to the Party music video.
Background Switch
So in this scene they are dancing and the background changes to these stock photo clips because throughout this music video it's like Lil Nas X is editing the music video. If you don't have a green screen you'll need to use the rotoscope tool to be able to pull off this effect. Now Runway has a really cool green screen tool which is the rotoscope tool and it performs a lot faster than my experience using the rotobrush tool inside of After Effects. Runway is an online video editor and it has a bunch of other AI magic tools and I made a video where I demo a few of them so you definitely have to check it out. The way it works inside of Runway is you just create a new project a new video composition and then from the assets folder you can upload whatever video clip you're working with. In this case I have the stock footage clip of this guy dancing and because he's not in front of a green screen I'm going to use the AI magic tool green screen to separate him from the background. All we have to do is just click on our subject and it begins the selection and bam it's done. Now let's play it back and see how it did. It's perfect. We didn't have to customize it so click on done masking and this is all online. It's not an app that you download to your computer. So here I have the photos already downloaded before I drag them in. We need to bring this up onto video layer 2 and now I can drop in all of my photos. So I have all the photos here laid out. Now I just need to make some adjustments to the position of the photos as well as him to make sure it looks like he's actually on the ground and not floating. So in this case I can scale him up just by clicking over here on the size and then drag him down using the Y control. Before I go in to show you some color and effects you can apply to the clips. I also downloaded this mouse click effect so it looks like you know the editor is clicking to change the background. What I did is I already imported these for example mouse a let's go ahead and drop this into our timeline and it will create another layer.
Mouse Clicks
You can see it's way too big and it's a bit slow. So let's scale this down and let's move this over about right here and let's speed up the clip and this is what it looks like and when it clicks we need to move that exact point at the cut point. There we go. Let's go ahead and cut off the edge here of this clip so we can roll this clip in and then I can animate the mouse in so I can click on animate and choose from one of these presets so it can zoom in for example. Let's try this one. Let's go back to the timeline. There we go. I also uploaded a click sound effect from involved elements so let's drag this down and let's line up the click here. Let's see how it sounds. Nice so what I can do is duplicate the click and the click sound effect at each cut point. All right so I have the clicks. Another thing that you can consider doing is adding some effects to the background so you can make them have a particular look.
VHS FX and Looks
So if you go to effects here you can see that there's 8-bit, anamorphic, bloom. You can kind of go through and have a lot of fun using these effects to help bring your music video to life. Ah VHS is cool. If we wanted to add a VHS look to everything we can click on him and click on the VHS add and then add it to each photo as well. So we added the VHS effect to all of the clips and once you're done with your final look you can go up to export and you can also export it as ProRes which is great and 4K if you have a pro plan. All right so let's add some music behind this and here's the final effect.
Motion Tracking Clipart
So there's another shot from this music video where they motion tracked this clip art to the captain's head. And this is another effect that you can do using the AI magic tool inside of Runway, the motion tracking. So here on this stock video clip, if I want to put this crown on top of his head here and I resize it and scale it down to place on his head, when we play it back, you can see it just doesn't stay on his head because it needs to be motion tracked.
So we can click on the video clip, then go over to AI magic tools, motion tracking. And from here, we need to select a high contrast area. So an area on his headphone here that has a light and dark area is probably good or here would be good too. So let's try this spot and let's see if this red dot stays glued to that spot.
Yeah, I think it did a pretty good job. Let's go ahead and click done tracking. And now we can select the crown and link it to the motion of the video clip. And then we just have to realign it here. We can maybe rotate it slightly and scale it down a bit. And now the crown stays glued to his head just through that one motion tracking point. I know it's kind of like a tacky effect, but if you're making music videos and you wanna have different objects be tracked to the people on screen, you can use the motion tracking from Runway to do this exact effect.
Gen-1 for Visualizers
So the last effect here is by Jaden's visualizer, Bye. You can see the background has kind of this like trippy, melty visualizer in the background. So to produce this effect, I thought I'd try out Gen 1, which is Runway's new tool to generate videos from existing ones. And you currently need to request access. If you're inside of Runway, down at the bottom, you can click on request access and learn more about how Gen 1 works. And I actually made a whole video on Gen 1, testing out different styles and modes, and you can check it out by clicking right up here. So because I cannot show the UI yet of Gen 1, what I've done is I've imported the original clips, my reference images, as well as the output here inside of a Runway timeline. So this is the original clip here from Elements. And I took a screenshot of Jaden's music video and basically told Gen 1 to apply this style to this clip. And this was the result. So it rotoscoped it out automatically and placed kind of this dreamy landscape behind it. And you know, I could test this multiple times. I also did this with a couple other clips. So this is the original clip here, and then this is the second clip. And actually with this one, I didn't use the reference image. I just typed in a text prompt, add rainbow majestic background.
And it spit out this result. I also did it with this clip here of this dancer, and I asked it to apply a majestic rainbow background, and this is the result. So if you wanna make some dreamy visualizers for your music video and you have a bunch of shots, you can request access for Gen 1, upload all of your clips, add in a text prompt or a reference image, and then you can build all of these really cool visualizers together for your entire music video. So I think that Gen 1 is really exciting. You can apply any type of style you want, whether it's the painting style of Vincent van Gogh or stop motion animation, claymation, really anything that you can think of. Definitely, definitely request access. I'll put a link below. Hopefully these music video effects were useful to you. If you want some more music video effects, you can click right over here and you can click over here to subscribe. Thanks so much for watching. And as always, keep creating better video with a gal. See you next time. Bye.