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Removing judder from panning shots (image stabilization issues)
I am experiencing some serious judder problems while shooting long pans on my Canon C300 with a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6L IS USM and a Miller Compass 20 fluid head. We were pulling them really smooth (the Miller fluid head is amazing), but you can see these tiny jumps in the footage. Right now I suspect it was the fact that we had image stabilization active on the lens while trying to pull the pans (totally sucks). Image stabilization tried to keep the image centered while we slowly pulled across the landscape creating small, but still perceptible, little judders in the footage. It could be something else, but we were getting similar problems using the same lens with image stabilization activated on an entirely different C300 body and fluid head. Right now the Warp Stablizer in Premiere Pro CC (Smooth Motion/100% Smoothness/Subspace Warp/Stabilize, Crop, Auto-Scale) is not completely doing the trick. Those little ticks and jumps are killing me. You can see the Warp Stabilized footage alongside the original footage at this link:
Can I do something else with the Warp Stabilizer to make this even smoother? Are there third-party plugin solutions or techniques that can be used in After Effects? Is there a temporal smoothing process that works on judder of this type? I really want to get rid of the judder without having to reshoot various locations. It’s small but noticeable. Any tips or thoughts would be greatly appreciated.
The original footage was shot at 1920×1080, 50MBPS, 23.976fps, Progressive and exported for Vimeo at 1280×720, 23.976fps, Progressive VBR, 2 Pass, Max 5MBPS. I am using a MacBook Pro Retina 2.6 GHZ Intel Core i7 running Adobe Creative Cloud.
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5 Replies
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Try increasing Smoothness (it goes up to 1000%), and under Advanced settings enable Detailed Analysis.
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I was hoping the Detailed Analysis would help, but I am still gettingjudder and small hiccups in the pan. There are so many edges to work with I can’t understand why it can’t completely smooth it out.
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Do you need to use the warping functionality? If not, try again with position-only. Another alternative is the After Effects Motion Stabilizer, but it is more time consuming.
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I will try again with position only. Is there a big difference with the After Affects Motion Stabilizer? Is set up the same way? I am willing to put in the longer wait time if it means saving these clips. Much appreciated.
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The AE motion stabilizer is more interactive. You set a target point and it holds the image steady. For a panning shot like yours, you would then add position keyframes to smoothly move the shot. Here is an example; the arc in the thin green line shows how the image was repositioned:
The results are very good, but Motion Stabilizer has a tendency to lose the target point. Progress needs to be monitored (almost frame by frame). When things veer off course you have to stop and try again, or set a new target starting at the last good point. I have used as many as 12 sequential targets to get through 30-40 seconds of footage. The example above required seven trackers.
On the plus side, all of the tracking data is available for editing. Tracking values can be modified. In addition, you can insert position offsets to fix bad tracking points without changing the generated data.
The same approach could potentially be applied with Warp Stabilizer output. Disable auto-scaling and auto-cropping, apply Warp Stabilizer, then use position keyframes to manually smooth the jittery points. It might work better with Warp Stabilizer in AE because composition dimensions can be set larger than the image. (Warp Stabilizer in Premiere requires sequence dimensions to match the footage.) This provides extra image to fill in the edges when repositioning.
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