Create a Surveillance Camera

It is surprising how often you work hard to make one camera look like another. One end of the spectrum has the never-ending pursuit of that authentic film look. Fake found footage, imitated home video and VCR recordings are on the other end.

In this tutorial, you will create a fake surveillance camera. This is a two-in-one tutorial. I start with an animated HUD style overlay. Only rectangular frame boundaries, a blinking record light, and few text elements. You can create this as a standalone Fusion effect and then layer it over any footage in the edit.

Coming to the footage itself, I do a quick and dirty color grade and add distortion effects. Fusion offers color and lens distortion tools, grain, noise and more. In the end, I create a noise bar distortion effect that loops through the frame.

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