-
Advice for stabilizing shaky timelapse of fish being eaten to the bone (lol)?
Hi. I’m trying to stabilize a piece of shaky footage. It’s a timelapse done of a fish being eaten by dermestid beetles. It was done in a heated outdoor shack in the spring, and the temperature fluctuations led to the wooden shack expanding and contracting, which moved the camera a bit.
I tried using many different settings on AE’s Warp Stabilizer, and while some helped a bit they didn’t do the trick. I tried Davinci Resolve’s different stabilizing options. That worked a bit better than Warp, but it still wasn’t perfect.
I could go full manual and go frame by frame to do sub-pixel position adjustments, but that’s not ideal – but of course doing this, or doing this with a bit of Warp in sections where it works better could be a last resort.
Another possibility is working with the source footage more. This clip is a sped up version of 1.5 TB of images, which are about 30% larger in size. I’m working with the sped up version because stabilizing the source footage would take a while, but sometimes giving Warp more to work with time-wise and resolution-wise can help.
Do people have any recommendations for other stabilization plug-ins, other programs with different stabilization software, or even just techniques for using Warp or AE’s built-in tracker better? If I had planned it out better I would’ve put physical stabilization assist markers in the corners of the frame as there’s not much in the shot that stays consistent that can be used for tracking.
You can download a copy of the clip here to experiment if you want. You can see by the moving borders of the frame at the end that I already did some manual adjustments because I bumped the camera a bit as I was doing stop motion to move the bones away.
To just watch it go here:
Thank you so much!
Some contents or functionalities here are not available due to your cookie preferences!This happens because the functionality/content marked as “Google Youtube” uses cookies that you choosed to keep disabled. In order to view this content or use this functionality, please enable cookies: click here to open your cookie preferences.
-
3 Replies
-
I like it now, gives it an authentic camera shake.
Not so CG-like.
-
I’m with Eric, I don’t mind the little bits of shake. But: if you’re hell-bent on it, I think that the Point Tracker will be your best bet for this. If you’re having trouble finding a solid contrasty point to track, try pre-comping a copy and bringing up the brightness with Curves, and use the tracking data from that one to apply to your darker original.
You may only have to track a few places–there are really only four or five little bumps that I’m seeing, and the Point Tracker could easily be used to just smooth those out.
Alternately, the other trick I like to use for something like this is just a simple Ken Burns transit-and-zoom-in-or-out so there’s a little additional motion, and the jumps will feel more natural.
-
This works perfectly – luckily there are some pieces of dust that are very stable. I also like the idea of embracing the movement, but the shots in the rest of the film are stable so having that for this shot would make it stand out. Thanks a lot.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up