stabilizing video in AE

[Mike Clasby]

Quick Stabilize run through:

Select the layer to be stabilized.

Animation>Stabilize Motion
The tracking is done in the layer Window, so go with it, when you’re done, the layer will be stable in the comp window.
Click on the Rotation checkbox, so you have Position and Rotation checked.
Move the Track Points to two spots to get a good track (can be tricky, experience helps)
Now click the Analyze Forward (one frame at a time is better, so you can see when it jumps off track. See Aharon’s link below for manually adjusting tracks that jump off-track)

If you get a good track, click “Apply” (both X and Y) and close the layer window.

Back in the comp, your footage should be stabilized.

Trouble! What to do with those black wedges around the sides of the stabilized layer. To get rid of those, you need to:

1) Scale up the layer. If the footage was real shaky, you can loose resolution in a hurry, or

2) Often you can get away with Effect>Stylize>Motion Tile. Then check the “Mirror Edges” box and change the Output Width and Output Height to 150 (or whatever it takes to cover the gaps).

You could use a combo of the two.

3) If you over-sampled in the shooting, like shooting HD for end an product of broadcast NTSC, you can stabilize the HD footage, then drop that into an NTSC comp, positioning it so the black wedges don’t show.

Most of the time Motion Tile is fine.

How to adjust frame by frame when the tracker gets cranky (Part Three of his tut, “Creating a Cartoon from Video”).

https://forums.creativecow.net/articles/rabinowitz_aharon/cartoon_look/Cartoon_Part_3/index.htm

Andrew stabilizes motion here, in the first five minutes of this tut;

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

(Then he goes on to destabilize it after he attaches an effect and sunglasses, so watch the first five minutes.)

Hope these help.

[Mike Clasby]

Just remembered! If you have PhotoShop Extended, you can stabilize Video with the “Align” function, saw it in an online Seminar, here:

https://pacific.adobe.acrobat.com/p66856872/

[Todd Kopriva]

The answer from yikesmikes is good, but I thought that you might appreciate a link to some more detail. If so, check out the “Track or stabilize motion” section of After Effects Help.