Stabilizing a shaky video pan

[Brian Lynn]

Check out these tutorials on Set Extensions, and Demon Face warp by Andrew Kramer. By combining the concept of tracking multiple points from Set Extensions, and reverse motion tracking to eliminate camera movement in Demon Face Warp, you should be able to stabalize the image fairly well.

You will likely loose edges and either have to repeat edges to hide black areas, or crop out an area you like from the middle of the stabalized video.

I’ve just started with a new tool called SynthEyes. Its a tracking tool that can interact with AE in someways, but it also includes the ability to stablize shots with many different options. Go to their website as well and watch the video on how SynthEyes stabalizes a shot. The arial helicopter video stabalization is the one that comes to mind. It will include some concepts you might want to think about as well.

SynthEyes itself might be the tool you’re looking for. There is a lot of good info on their site as to what the program is capable of. Check it out, if it works for you it just might be worth the cost for some of the features, like (I forget what its really called…) “auto-crop”. Basically it automatially maximizes the viewable image you can crop to based on where the stabalized image twists in and out of frame, not allowing the frame to hit black ever.

Hope that helps!!

[Kristian Pettyjohn]

Thanks so much, I will check it out!

[John Snow]

Sorry for reactivating this post but I am trying to achieve the same thing. I set up my null objects with tracking data and now I am stuck. I am not sure how to stabilize the footage using the null objects that contain the tracking data. I know I have to parent some stuff but I need to only stabilize the y direction since my pan is in the x direction. However my null objects have both x and y tracking data so a simple parent of my footage to the first null object causes the entire footage to go off screen. Any ideas on what I should do? The tracking for each of my null objects is done like in the Set Extensions tutorial except I have 12 null objects instead of 2. They are parented up like in the tutorial and that works perfectly so that anything I parent to the first null object will follow it through the pan. I dont need the x data and only want to apply the y data and the rotation data to my footage to stabilize it but I am unsure how to do this.

[Daniel Barham]

Use the effect Warp Stabilizer and set the type to Tripod Pan