Motion Transfer

Motion Transfer is a technique that extracts just the motion and camera movement from a video and applies it to a different person or scene.

Think of a puppet show. The puppeteer's hand movements and timing stay the same, but the puppet on stage gets swapped out. In the original footage, the pace of an actor's walk, the moment they turned their head, the rhythm of camera shake — all of that stays intact, while only the person or background on screen changes.

With older methods, fixing one thing you didn't like meant tweaking the prompt and regenerating the entire video, which also wiped out any well-timed acting or camera movement that had worked. Motion Transfer fixes the motion itself as a set value and pastes it onto something new, making it especially useful for timing-sensitive work like choreography or beat-synced videos.

Higgsfield, in introducing its video editing tool Genjutsu, distinguished between Motion Transfer and Object Swap as two separate modes of operation. The two are easy to confuse: Motion Transfer applies the entire motion and camera work of the original video onto a new person or scene, while Object Swap changes only specific elements on screen, like clothing or props, while leaving everything else untouched.

1. Prepare a short reference video with clear motion — a walking motion, hand gestures, or a scene with camera movement work well.
2. Also prepare an image of the person or character you want that motion applied to.
3. Select the Motion Transfer mode, and you'll get a video where the original timing and camera work are preserved while the new person is overlaid on top.
4. You can get similar results by picking one of the preset options instead of writing your own prompt.