Stabilizing Footage With Rotation?

[Kevin Camp]

do you just want to stabilize the shot as the camera rotates… e.i. you like the rotation you have, but the camera’s center point moves a bit in the frame.

if you have a point to track that is at the center (or very close to it), then track that, but not for rotation, just stabilization. then the camera rotation should be maintained, but the center point should not move in the frame.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Conseannery]

I have a very annoying rotation along the optical axis in my footage. I want to get rid of it. However, the footage is low quality DV and AE seems to have difficulties getting clean tracking data out of the clip.

I uploaded the HuffYUV 2.1 compressed file at megaupload.com so that you can have a closer look at it in case you have the time.
It’s 169MB.

https://www.megaupload.com/?d=HRA5LMZ7

I would be very thankful if one of you could even try to stabilize it since I just don’t get it done properly. This is bugging me since 2 days.
This short clip is part of a student project and tomorrow is deadline 🙁

Of course any instructions are also highly appeciated 🙂

Thanks a lot guys!!

[Kevin Camp]

if the edges of the footage are clean, you can try motion tile, mirroring the edges, to expand the frame some. if you have bad edges, you can drop the footage into a slightly smaller comp (to ‘crop’ the edges), the stablilize, then add motion tile.

motion tile won’t remove edges or enlarge your footage, but it can help to hide the edges of video that shifts in the frame, and it can help to reduce how much you may need to enlarge your footage to fill the comp.

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Conseannery]

Yes I understand what motion stabilization does.

As I said I don’t have unwanted motion from side to side, but along the optical axis.

I pick two tracking points in the video that should be stationary. AE analyzes them and then puts the keyframe into the Rotation channel of the video. The video now is cropped to accomodate for the rotation, but it still rotates along the optical axis which it shouldn’t do after applying the tracking data, right?
My guess is that the poor video quality makes it hard for AE to properly analyze the footage although the chosen tracking points have a very high contrast (dark on bright yellow background).

I will upload the clip again with a different codec. But still HuffYUV is ideal because it compresses by approx. 1:3 and is lossless. So if anybody of you wants to try the stabilization themselves you need the clip in a lossless format. Are there other more common lossless codecs I could use?

Tx!

[Conseannery]

Thanks for the tipps! But my problem is that the rotation is not eliminated with AE’s motion stabilizer. I know that I have to scale up the footage afterwards, but I wish I was so far 😉 Still having this annoying rotation that I can’t get rid of 🙁

[Kevin Camp]

uploading the original dv (at its 1:5 compression) would be as good a quality as it’s gonna get (transcoding won’t make it any better, just slows the bleeding)….

but i tried your link, but i was unable to download the file… something about i had exceeded my bandwidth and needed to wait 108 min to download..?

ae’s tracker is not the best tracker in the world, but it should do a decent job of this if you have good, sharp contrasting points (which it sounds like you do). and, in the case of rotation tracking, points that are pretty far apart (the further the better). try using luminance for tracking (dv has better luminance resolution than chroma). you’ll also want to make sure ae is correctly separating fields (select footage in the project window, then file>interpret footage…).

Kevin Camp
Designer – KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW

[Conseannery]

I don’t have access to the original DV files. They are in the university. I exported from AVID uncompressed to now do some post work in AE.

Anyway, I have high contrasting points, but they are not sharp, because the footage was shot during sunset and is generally of low quality. Also I interpreted the footage correctly. But I will try to space the tracker points more far apart. Can’t do it right now…rendering stuff.

Tx.

[Conseannery]

Ok hwg again…now DV compressed:

https://www.megaupload.com/de/?d=BOKMJ0HC

[Conseannery]

In case queueing at megaupload takes too long:

https://rapidshare.com/files/66143957/convert.avi

[Peter O’connell]

like this, maybe? (aep file and footage)

https://www.peteoconnell.com/7555/stabilize%20folder.zip

Pete O’Connell