The video magnification technology gives people an opportunity to observe and study small changes in things. A video is decomposed by the complex steerable pyramid and the motion in the video is manipulated by analyzing the phase differences at different scales and in different directions. Magnified signals at some scales in the complex steerable pyramid exceed their phase shift limits, resulting in artifacts and blurring. This problem can be solved by adjusting the magnification factor for each scale. In this study, a video magnification algorithm based on multi-scale filtering is proposed. A relation between the spatial wavelength of a video frame image and vibration displacement is established to determine the upper limit of the magnification factor for each scale. The manual setting of a cut-off wavelength is no longer necessary, and the amplification factor for each scale in the complex steerable pyramid is adjusted automatically so that magnified signals can adapt to their phase shift limits. The vibration attached to the large motion is magnified to verify the performance of the proposed algorithm, and the result shows that it has obvious advantages over the existing video amplification algorithms.