stabilise pan across a room

[Kevin Camp]

videocopilot.net has several tutorials that show ways to deal with this, here’s one of them:

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/kramer_andrew/Set_Extensions.php

Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Chris Wright]

For something like this, I don’t think AE’s simple motion tracking will easily give the results you want. Here’s my thoughts ,but if you still want to use AE’s motion tracking, simple hold the ALT key and drag to a new object that’s in frame. AE will keep the offset tracking correctly.

1. virtualdub’s free deshaker is super easy to use and gives great results. It uses vectors to control the camera smoothing by filling in edges, and adaptive zooms. Really good programming.

2. Use Ae’s timewarp with pixel motion then precomp it and timestretch that to the same timewarp amount in the same fps. It will maintain the same fps but will smooth out any jerky movements.

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

[Ajay Brar]

So I have been trying the AE motion stabilise without much success.

I can now get the track points going without problem. From your posts and the net, seems like you can use multiple objects by
1. Moving the region with the Opt (i have a mac) key pressed to a new object in frame.
2. Creating a null object and copying the keyframe data to it. Then continuing with new track points and then copying its data and so on.

The problem is the pan though. If I try and stabilise, it will try and maintain the object at the same point which means I will be left with a blank screen as it tries to offset the pan motion. The soln from another web tutorial was to manually change the position to compensate for this or use the expression AnchorPoint.smooth.

I tried this with smooth(.2,5) and its still jerky. Something to point out here is that the original footage is a little jerky as opposed to being shaky and this jerkiness doesn’t go away with doing the above. I also had to get rid of the rotation offsets because since the camera moves from the wall and looks down at the floor and then around the bed, the rotation stabilising is way off.

I am now going to try the timewarp that you suggested and if that doesn’t do it, the deshaker after that.

Lot of pain for a 33second clip!

[Ajay Brar]

The tutorials are helpful but my scenario is different. It is a panning motion and not a simple one across an area but a camera travelling through a room – over a wall, floor, bed and so on.

So I guess what I am looking for is smoothing more than anything. I want to eliminate the slight jerks from the handheld movement and make it into a nice smooth continuous motion.

[Ajay Brar]

I added timewarp but when I do a RAM preview the footage starts cutting up – in that there is a pan over a bedroom poster and parts of the poster drift out of place, and start appearing on other parts of the wall.

I have used the default settings, selected pixel motion, speed at 50%.

Any ideas on why it is doing that rather than simply slowing down the movement of the camera?

[Ajay Brar]

here is what it looks like

[Chris Wright]

Timewarp isn’t perfect and often needs to be tweaked. Under tuning there’s vector detail which can go up to 100 and smoothing global and local modifiers, and filtering set as extreme. Also, Reevision’s Twixtor has custom hand drawn vector maps where you can guide the vectors to do the right thing.

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/

[Chris Wright]

I forgot to add, Twixtor pro’s forward interop with smart blend is designed to work with pans, so try the demo too. Here’s the tut.

https://library.creativecow.net/articles/freitag_lori/twixtor_premiere-pro_artifacts/video-tutorial

https://technicolorsoftware.hostzi.com/