Abstract Video magnification reveals subtle changes invisible to the naked eye, but such tiny yet meaningful changes are often hidden under large motions: small deformation of the muscles in doing sports, or tiny vibrations of strings in ukulele playing. For magnifying subtle changes under large motions, video acceleration magnification method has recently been proposed. This method magnifies subtle acceleration changes and ignores slow large motions. However, quick large motions severely distort this method. In this paper, we present a novel use of jerk to make the acceleration method robust to quick large motions. Jerk has been used to assess smoothness of time series data in the neuroscience and mechanical engineering fields. On the basis of our observation that subtle changes are smoother than quick large motions at temporal scale, we used jerk-based smoothness to design a jerk-aware filter that passes subtle changes only under quick large motions. By applying our filter to the acceleration method, we obtain impressive magnification results better than those obtained with state-of-the-art.