Smooth camera pan – even out the jolts

[Justin Huss]

Unfortunately THE ONLY measurement I can think of, one can make in a piece of footage, is the evolution of the position of a point – and this will be achieved with tracking. I’m afraid bringing time remap in the equation makes things 10 times more intricate.

I didn’t come up with anything good enough for this. If I remember well I have not been able to find out how to stabilize a motion with Tracker. Shame 🙁

[Thomas Kiddle]

justin – what do you mean “the evolution of the position of a point” ?

had given up tryna do this a while ago, but I’ll try find my the code i wrote see if you guys think it was getting anywhere…

t = 0;
totalTime = 0;
while (t < time){ xsp=comp("pan").layer("Null 2").position.speedAtTime(t); if(xsp==0){ totalTime += this_comp.frame_duration; t += this_comp.frame_duration; } else{ totalTime += this_comp.frame_duration/(xsp/100); t += this_comp.frame_duration; } } totalTime

ok kinda cant remember how this was sposed to work, might of messed it all up in anger just before I quit.

(also only smoothing the horizontal movement, I'm ignoring any vertical movement)

so "null 2" was assigned the tracking movements of a point in the distance. then i used the speedAtTime() thing to get the speed of how fast it moves.

That IF statement is makes the movie play at normal speed (it is saposed to make the movie skip a frames but didnt bother tryna work it out.

and the else part which is the main part of the code, is sposed to slow down the movie based on how fast the point is moving across.
cant quite remember how it is sposed to work,
if goes from the start frame to the current frame working out how long each frame should last, based on how fast the point is moving across, and adding each frame to the totaltime value, it then uses this total time as what the remaped time should be.

xsp is the speed, so the higher the speed the shorter the current frame duration is (? is that right?) and the "100", i have no idea what this number should be.

what i think is the biggest problem and i think why i quit, was everything got real messed up because it calculates the speed off the null point which runs at the original speed.

I cant quite get my head around this...!!!

[Elaine Shue]

Responding to this ancient thread in case anyone else finds it via Google search, as I did, and can use this simple solution I used. I think this is similar or identical to what Ian described, but I couldn’t quite understand his description so maybe this will help someone. This is in CC 2017:

1. Create a null object and keyframe its position to the first and last frame of the uneven pan, so its anchor point is attached to a point on the image (e.g., I attached it to the top of a particular tree). By default the null object will move evenly across the frame, so it won’t always be in sync with the point you picked.
2. Use Motion Stabilizer to stabilize the footage to that point (in my case, the top of the tree).
3. Set the footage layer to have the Null layer as its parent.
4. Scale the footage as needed to hide blank frames at either end of the pan.

Voila!