• Adobe After Effects

  Applying Stabilization to a Duplicate Layer

  Posted by Alex Kuzelicki on May 6, 2010 at 4:01 pm

  Hi there,

  I have a problem that I’m pretty sure there’s a simple answer to… but my brain can’t seem to access its memory banks.

  So, I have some footage (of people) shot hand-held on a green-screen with tracking markers. My plan was to stabilize the shot, key it, add in the background and atmosphere elements and then ‘unstabilize’ the whole thing (ie. reintroduce the hand-held movement).

  For various reasons (it’s a long story), I made the footage into a TIFF sequence and keyed it out, cleaned it up, etc first – before stabilizing it. I didn’t see that as much of a problem: I figured I’d just use a duplicate of the original footage to get the stabilization data and apply that to the TIFF sequence.

  But I’ve forgotten how to do that.

  I thought you had to pickwhip the Position of the unstable layer to the Anchor Point of the stable layer, but that doesn’t work. So now I’m all confused.

  Basically, I want to use the stabilization data of a (stabilized) piece of footage on the original footage, which isn’t stabilized… so I can make it stable too. Hopefully that makes sense.

  If so, anyone know how to do that?

  Would save my brain frying for too much longer. Thanks kindly in advance,

  ALEX

  Alex Kuzelicki replied 16 years, 4 months ago 2 Members · 2 Replies
• 2 Replies

• 

  Tudor “ted” jelescu

  May 6, 2010 at 8:55 pm

  How about just copy the keyframes from the stabilized layer (position and rotation) and paste them to the keyed layer- or just apply the stabilization data to that layer in the first place.

  Tudor “Ted” Jelescu
  Senior VFX Artist
  Bucharest, Romania
  http://www.ennstudio.ro
• 

  Alex Kuzelicki

  May 7, 2010 at 2:23 am

  Hey Ted,
  Thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately, I can’t directly stabilize the layer I want to as the tracking markers have already been removed (ie. there’s nothing to track from). But your simple solution, of just pasting the (Anchor Point) keyframes worked. Actually, last night, I did try parenting the keyed layer to the stabilized layer (which is effectively the same thing) but it didn’t seem to work. This morning I realized that my stabilization data wasn’t that ‘stable’ – so it was working after all. I was just too… (insert your own adjective here)… to realize it.

  Please forgive my fuzzy, 3am brain 🙂 Anyway, I redid the stabilization, parented the keyed layer to it and all’s fine.

  Hey Dave,
  Thanks to you too. Your suggestion is what I planned to do AFTER stabilizing the footage (ie. reapplying the motion of the original footage to the (stabilized) keyed footage once composited with atmos and BG layers).

  All is good now, though.

  Thanks for the help guys. Appreciated.

  ALEX

  PS – We shot it hand-held… but not too hand-held 🙂

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