Use 3D Tracker Camera to stabilize/stop motion

[Blaise Douros]

No. The 3D Camera Tracker is designed to track the movement of the camera. AE then generates a virtual camera that replicates the movement of the real one, so that you can place objects within a scene that exactly match the motion of the real camera. AE’s virtual camera has no ability to affect the position, scale, rotation, warping, etc of the image it’s tracking–all it does is provide a frame of reference for objects in AE’s 3D environment.

Warp Stabilizer is probably what you’re looking for–it’s more automated and affects the whole image.

Finally, if you’re not getting a good track from the point trackers in After Effects (and thus, bad results on the motion stabilization generated from those tracked points), it’s possible that you need to learn better how to use them, and how to clean up the track data when the automated tracking is just not cutting the mustard. There are a million tutorials out there that Google can find for you. Don’t watch some random 13-year-old YouTuber’s tutorial. Try to find one by a professional like Brian Maffit–some of them are old, and (gasp) not HD, but they are still 100% relevant today.

[Dustin Parsons]

It’s not really that I can’t get a good track using the Stabilize Motion feature, I can, it just takes way longer to get the same quality track as the 3D Camera Tracker (and I like to save time). Guess I’ll have to add a feature request for this.

Thanks!

[Blaise Douros]

There’s no need to do a feature request–Warp Stabilizer already does exactly what you want to do. It analyzes the entire scene (not just tracking points that you specify), and adjusts the entire image to compensate.

[Gustavo Saliola]

Yes indeed, Dustin is right on point with the request. It would be not only good, but great to be able to use the camera data resulting from tracking for stabilization purposes. And no, the stabilizer doesn’t always solve everything. I’m not getting good stabs in a long crane shot that due to a long arm, it shakes and sways in irregular ways than confuses the stabilization, in each mode tried (warp, position/scale/rotation).

And for the record, Blaise, this is my 2nd day on this shot and prior to this, 2 more days in mocha stabilizer module with better results but unable to paste correctly the data in AE (Getting parallax errors and crossed corner pins).

So Dustin, make the request, i’ll second you.

[Kalleheikki Kannisto]

I would say it depends on what it is that you are trying to stabilize. I haven’t tried this but in theory this should work.

1) Do a 3D camera track
2) Create 3D nulls at the point around which you want to stabilize
3) Use an expression to convert the 3D position data to 2D screen coordinates
4) Offset layer by negative amount of the motion in relation to time = 0

That would be position-only stabilization. For scale and orientation you would need at least two points and calculations of the angle and distance between them, and then you would inverse those for rotation and scale values for the layer.

Smoothing the motion would be that plus adding back in a smoothed null motion values.

This all assumes there’s relatively little camera motion but enough to get a track. You won’t be able to “stabilize” in 3D, i.e. remove perspective distortions from camera moving in z.

Kalleheikki Kannisto
Senior Graphic Designer