How to make a lyric video with beat-synced screen shaking
Upload your track to Vizard Agent and say you want the screen to shake harder on the heavy parts. Vizard Agent transcribes the vocals with word timings, measures the song's energy and harshness across its whole length, and ties the shake to those measurements so it intensifies where the track actually gets heavier.
What is the short version?
A lyric video is a solved problem right up until you want the picture to react to the music. "Shake more on the growls" is easy to say and impossible to do by hand without listening to the whole song with a notepad, twice.
- Go to Vizard Agent and upload the track and the artwork.
- Say the effect you want and where it should get stronger.
- Say the shape and whether the lyrics should be styled to the genre.
What do you need before you start?
The track and a description of the reaction. Vizard Agent finds the words and measures the intensity itself, so what it needs from you is the rule connecting them: which parts of the song should look different, and how much different.
- The audio. The mastered track. Vizard Agent transcribes the vocals from it.
- The artwork. Album art or a still. It becomes the background.
- The effect. Shake, pulse, flash, zoom. Name one rather than asking for "effects".
- Where it intensifies. Growls, the chorus, the drop, the last minute.
- How far to push it. This is the note people give most often on the first cut.
What do you type into Vizard Agent?
Describe the rule, not the timestamps. Vizard Agent measures the song and works out where the rule applies, so "more shaking when it gets heavy" is a complete instruction and a list of timecodes is work you do not need to do.
Prompt
Variants worth knowing:
- Tie it to the chorus instead. A different rule against the same measurements.
- Font changes with intensity. Bigger type on the heavy parts is a related and effective trick.
- A quieter version. Say so; the first cut of this format is almost always too much.
What does Vizard Agent actually do?
Here is the order Vizard Agent worked in on a real lyric video. The step that makes the whole thing work is a measurement, not an effect: it builds an intensity curve for the song and drives everything from that.
- Probes the uploaded file and checks the audio track.
- Grabs sample frames and a full-resolution frame of the artwork.
- Loads the music-video playbook rather than improvising a structure.
- Transcribes the vocals with word timings.
- Analyses the song structure and locates the growl sections.
- Reads the full transcript and checks the caption styling options.
- Measures the song's energy and harshness envelopes across its whole length.
- Browses the available fonts and reads every word-level timing.
- Crops the artwork for the background and the logo, indexes every sung word, and builds the lyric line files against the measured curves.
Step 7 is the whole technique. "Where it gets heavy" is not a section boundary you can guess from the structure; it is a measurable property of the audio, and once it is measured the shake can follow it continuously rather than switching on and off at a marker.
What does the result look like?
From the run this page is written from, probed on the delivered file: 1920x1080, H.264, 24fps, 267.01 seconds, AAC audio. Wide and four and a half minutes, the full song, with lyrics timed to the words and a shake that tracks the track's own intensity.
Four minutes is unusual for anything else on this site. A lyric video is one of the few formats where full length is the point, since it is made to be listened to rather than scrolled past.
Four and a half minutes is the whole song. Vizard Agent times every line against the vocal rather than against a fixed grid, which is why the lyrics stay locked to the words through tempo changes and instrumental passages.
When does this not work well?
The whole effect depends on the audio being measurable and the lyrics being transcribable, and heavy music is exactly where both of those get harder. Vizard Agent measures the intensity rather than guessing at it, and some vocals defeat transcription entirely no matter what.
- Growled and screamed vocals transcribe badly. You will likely need to paste the lyrics yourself for those sections.
- The first cut is always too much. Ask for less shake than you think you want; it is easier to add.
- Shake fights readability. The lyrics have to stay legible, which puts a ceiling on the effect.
- Motion can trigger discomfort. Heavy camera shake is a real accessibility problem for some viewers, and it is worth restraining for that reason alone.
- The music is yours to clear. Vizard Agent builds the video around the track you upload; the rights are your side.
How do you fix a result that came back wrong?
Say which part and which direction. Vizard Agent keeps the transcript, the word timings, the measured envelopes and the lyric line files, so dialling the effect down or restyling one section works against curves it has already computed.
- "A little less shaking." The same rule at a lower amplitude.
- "The font is too big at 1:51." Type size re-tied to the measured intensity there.
- "That line is wrong." Corrected in the lyric file and re-rendered.
How does Vizard Agent compare to doing it yourself?
By hand this is transcribing the lyrics, timing every single line, then listening through four and a half minutes with a notepad marking every point where the track gets heavier, and finally keyframing an effect against all of those marks by hand.
| By hand | Vizard Agent | |
|---|---|---|
| Lyric timing | Line by line | Word-level timings from the vocal |
| Finding the heavy parts | Listen with a notepad | Energy and harshness measured |
| The effect | Keyframe each section | Driven by the measured curve |
| Toning it down | Re-keyframe everything | Same curve, lower amplitude |
Common questions
Can it transcribe screamed vocals? Poorly. Paste the lyrics for those sections and Vizard Agent times them against the audio.
Does it work for the whole song? Yes. This is one of the few formats where full length is normal rather than excessive.
Can the font change with the music? Yes, and it is effective. Bigger type on the heavy parts is tied to the same measurement.
What if the shake is too strong? Say so. Vizard Agent lowers the amplitude against the same curve rather than rebuilding.
Can I use my own artwork? Yes. Upload it and Vizard Agent crops it for the background and pulls the logo out of it as a separate element.
Can it style the lyrics to the genre? Yes. Vizard Agent browses the installed fonts and picks one that suits the track rather than defaulting.
Who clears the music? You do. Vizard Agent builds the video around whatever track you upload and does not check the rights.
Can it handle tempo changes? Yes. The timings come from the vocal itself rather than from a fixed grid.