Change strength of Stabilize Motion

[Darby Edelen]

What kind of stabilization are you doing? The Warp Stabilizer in CS5.5 allows you to specify how “smooth” you’d like the stabilization to be.

If you’re doing old school point tracking then after you’ve stabilized the clip you can use the smooth() expression on the layer’s anchor point to reduce the stabilization:

smooth(.2, 5);

The first value (.2) is the width in seconds of the smoothing. The second value (5) is the number of samples across this (.2) duration. You should always use an odd number for the second value so that there is a sample on the current frame (5 is usually good enough).

The way this works in this case is a little counter intuitive. Higher width values for the smooth will actually result in less smooth stabilization. Smaller width values will result in the stabilization being closer to its original (locked tripod) look. The value you’ll want to use will depend a lot on how shaky your original footage was and how much of that shake you want to maintain, use higher width values to maintain more of the original shake, and lower to reduce the shake. I find .2 to be a good starting point.

If you like you can specify this width value in frames instead of seconds by adding a framesToTime() function call:

smooth(framesToTime(6), 5);

Darby Edelen

[Chris Wood]

This seems like it should work perfectly, thank you!