• Adobe After Effects

  stabilize motion

  Posted by Accountclosedduetonorealnameused on October 18, 2006 at 4:45 pm

  I have footage of a walk through a forest. It is from a handheld camera, so the footsteps are felt in the footage, as well as the shaky hand.

  I would like to stablize this footage, but keep overall, broad camera moves, while loosing the shakiness of it.

  I know smoke/flame has the capability to solve this, but I’d like to stay away from that.

  Is there a good way to do this in AE? Can anyone point me to a good tutorial on this?

  Mike Clasby replied 19 years, 10 months ago 2 Members · 1 Reply
• 1 Reply

• 

  Mike Clasby

  October 18, 2006 at 6:55 pm

  Dave’s Null motions and parenting is best if you can get a nice sway going, but if you want to take the edges off Stabilization, smooth it (1st, below) or split the difference (see Filip below). These don’t separate the sway of walking from the jerk of hand movement, just smooth it.

  Two thoughts, first, mine are a bit lame compared to the second, Filip’s.

  1st –
  After you stabilize and hit apply, AE adjusts the Anchor Point keyframes to take the shake out. You could try to smooth those keyframes with the Smoother (make dups of the layer as the Smoother is Trail and Error) or use the flipside of wiggle, the smooth expression:

  smooth(2, 5)

  This from AE Help is all I know about the smooth expression, but I do know it’s not as intuitive as wiggle, raising the width smoothes more:

  Number or Array smooth(width=.2, samples=5, t=time) {width, samples, and t are numbers} Applies a box filter to the value of the property at the specified time, and smooths the result over time. Width (in seconds) is the range of time over which the filter is averaged. Samples equals the number of discrete samples evenly spaced over time. Generally, you’ll want samples to be an odd number so that the value at the current time is included in the average. For example, position.smooth(.1, 5).

  2nd-
  Having already typed this in, I remembered Filip Vandueren had some creative ways to modify Camera Shake. This expression for position, splits the difference (50% as shown, adjust % as needed) between the new Anchor Point keyframes (after stabilization) and position, effectively splitting the difference between stabilized and shaky:

  precision= 50; // use a percentage from 0-100 % ,
  position= ( value*precision + anchorPoint*(100-precision))/100 ;

  If you tie the 50 to a slider you could make quick adjustments.

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