real time Warp Stabiliser ??

[Tero Ahlfors]

[Anhtu Vu] ” Is there a way to make it work in real time “

No.

[Angelo Lorenzo]

Try the demo of Prodad Mercalli Pro 2 on a few shots and see if it’s worth the purchase. I find it a suitable alternative to the warp stabilizer and it’s usually much faster.

——————–
Angelo Lorenzo

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[Tim Kolb]

The Warp Stabilizer is a pretty thorough effect. If a shot just needs x-y correction, you can go into the settings and choose an option other than the subspace warp process. You should speed up processing speed considerably.

Since the calculations associated with the effect are done on the CPU instead of the GPU, adding a different display card to your iMac (if that’s possible) probably won’t change the analysis time very much.

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[Anhtu Vu]

The ”calculation” time it takes prior to actually stabilizing the shot is the same wether you want simply x-y correction or full on…and this ”calculation” time takes foreverrrrrrrr!!!!

[Eric Barker]

I’m no expert, but I suspect that the type of processing used to make the calculations are being done by the CPU and not the GPU, so I doubt upgrading the graphics card would have any effect. Possibly more RAM if that’s getting to be an issue (I could imagine that amount of data takes up quite a bit of space), but I think this is one of those basic CPU speed things. However, one of the really nice things about Warp Stabilizer, and it’s one of the only plugins I know that does this, is that the calculations are PERMINANT and higher on the chain to all future renders/exports. That means, unlike Rendering, which has no effect on final export speed, WS calculations are stored beforehand and don’t have to be recalculated during render or export. By the time it’s doing the actual process, it’s really performing fundamentally simple tasks (especially if it’s not set to “sunspace warp”, which I find looks weird most of the time anyway), and is very processing efficient… Basically not much more than a bunch of key frame scale, pos, and rotation animation… Possibly even lower level code than that! I’ve found it to be almost as fast at rendering than the most basic effects. Many times it yellow lines on my machine with MPE enabled.

My suggestion? Throw them on at the end of the day and let it run over night, make sure autosave is on. On my machine it takes about 30 seconds per second of a 1080i60 clip, maybe less. Unless your’re putting it on every shot of an hour-long documentary, you should be okay by morning.

Do it dead last in your editing, too. WS only calculates the frames you’ve used (including transitions outside of the in/out points). Any time you add more frames to the clip, ether by shifting the clip or increasing a transition length, you’ll need to recalculate. Sometimes it’s actually neccessary to add additional time to the beginning and end of a clip if the footage happens to be shaky during the entrance. WS assumes that the starting point is the “correct” placement, if the starting point is shaky, you may want to temporarily back up the clip to a point that is better and recalculate, then slide the in point back into place, that’ll make sure that the clip starts off very smooth and “preroll calculated”. But most of the time this isn’t neccessary.

Also, consider not using the “sunspace warp” setting or even the “perspective” setting. They tend to do some crazy things behind the scenes and CAN look kind of bizarre, depending upon the situation. I tend to use “Position, Scale, Rotation” the most.

One more thing, if you really want to go for the Nth degree of perfection , say make a steadycam shot look exactly like a jib or dolly, then consider doing some additional rotation key frame animation manually. Turn off the auto rescale property (though take note of what it was), set it manually to something larger, and get to work. Unfortunately, I’ve found that WS is not as good at rotation fixing, especially when you’re performing purposeful camera moves.

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[Erik Lindahl]

The October release of CC will have a major performance boost to the Warp Stabilizer. I think we’re talking X-times fast (if it was “8 times faster on many systems). It could be this boost for now is only coming to After Effects however. I’d still say its best practice to do stabilizing in a separate project since all the analyzed data can make project saving / opening a very long process.

I’ve used extensive Warp Stabilizing in AE where I tend to add the effect to multiple clips in multiple comps and there by maximizing my performance. It sounds like this might not be needed in the new release (Oct 15th I believe).