Stabilize shaky footage

In this movie, we're gonna take a look at the warp stabilizer effect which is a really powerful effect in Premiere Pro that stabilizes your footage. There are some issues here that will want to repair.

I'll go to Effects, and I typed in warp here, so here is warp stabilizer. Go ahead and apply it to the video and you can see that right away, on the image its telling us that we're going to step one of two analyzing in background.

What it's doing is going to each of the frames in this clip and analyzing the footage for shaky movement figuring out where and how each pixel is moving. If we click on this clip and go to Effect Controls, you'll see that Analyze is grayed out, because it just did that and it actually has already stabilized it based upon this analysis. Let's see how it did. And then just once again without it, apply it.

All right, so it really fixed it a lot and it's pretty usable now. I'll go ahead and put this back on and I wanna come down to borders, because I wanna talk about exactly what this is doing. Here you can see that three things are happening. Its stabilizing, it's cropping, and it's auto-scaling. Usually all three of these things need to occur, but let's break this down and see how it's working step by step.

If I change this to Stabilize Only, and I just sort of scrub through here. You can see what's happening around the edges. Premiere Pro is doing a lot of complex camera moments to make this footage appear still, but as you can see keeping the footage at its normal scaling isn't gonna work, because we're seeing the evidence of this through these moving black borders.

Now if I change this to Stabilize and Crop, watch what happens. Now as I go through this we no longer have those moving black borders, what it's done is crop everything uniformly, so that we have just this still black border around everything. But we don't want a black border around our footage, so that's what Auto-scaling is about. If I choose that, you'll notice that it zooms in, so that we no longer have that black border and if you ever wanna know by how much its zoomed in by, come down to Auto-scale and you can see that it’s at 116.3 percent, which is certainly not bad.

So with all three things chosen you can see that things are looking pretty good. Let's come down to Smoothness for a moment though, you can see that the default value is at 50 percent. This determines exactly how smooth and how lockdown the shot is going to be. If I move this slider to the left it will stabilize a little less, allowing more camera movement to the image and if I move this slider to the right, it's going to stabilize it a little bit more removing even more camera movement.

All right, when I change this Smoothness value, you can see here that it has to re-stabilize, it doesn't have to re-Analyze. The Analysis is already occurred, but it has to actually re-perform the stabilization. All right, so now I'm at 75 percent instead of 50 percent and let's see the difference here. Okay, so it's a little bit more zoomed in and if you wanna move this all the way to a 100 or effectively change it to No Motion instead of Smooth Motion, watch how much it zooms in then. Okay, so instead of 116 percent zoomed in right to 126 percent. And we, basically, lockdown the camera.

Okay, so hopefully you agree this is not the most desirable result, we wanna go back to Smooth motion and I like to probably go back between 50 and 60 or so. Again stabilizing isn't about locking things down it's about smoothing the action out.

All right, so that's the warp Stabilizer effect. It can be very useful at stabilizing shaky footage, while still preserving some camera movement to keep things natural. Just play around with the parameters until you get your desired result.