Lessons

Lesson Info

Stabilizing Footage

This was just some footage I shot with my iphone let me go ahead and render it quick so you can see what it looks like in real time so it's going do a render process here this is what you know anybody will get when they're just hand holding their iphone and trying to be real still with it it's really hard when you're panning up down things like that um and I I've got a fairly steady hand usually but I don't know maybe I was drinking or something this's the evening, right? You know, I had a couple of years, but but it's still I mean, typically you get some pretty shaky footing. Well, let's see if we can fix that real quick. So what I'm going to use is something called the warp stabilizers. I just type in w a r p and there I got war report for work, work, work, work stabilized actually, you know what I don't have to do? I'm just going to go to my tracker. Uh well, here's work stabilizer here. It's right there. You can find it either there or if you happen to have this panel open, then yo...

u can select the file there and hit work stabilizer in that window that's what I typically do because I end up having that open again, we don't want to go down that road because it's a lot more than we can cover in one day but you can find that out in the other workshops so I'm gonna hit work stabilizer and all of a sudden it starts doing this it's analyzing its already working for you now there's some settings here that you might be concerned with the first thing I do is take it out of subspace war appear that's by default and I come down to position scale in rotation and the reason why I do that I'm doing it now because it has to start over analyzing and it takes a little bit to analyze this footage, so while I'm talking, we'll let it work in the background. What the subspace work does is it tries to figure out what what what's going on in the scene if you've got a little bit of a little bit of that jello effect you know and rolling shutter effect it will try to compensate for that if you've got a lens that has some distortion in it and of course these things that really this actually it's funny the iphone iphone five I found has less distortion in the camera, then the ipad mini does actually ipad and the ipad meeting if I'm holding this by hand and I'm doing this just ever so slightly, I get a little bit of you know, distortion warping have you ever noticed that plane with these things you get a little bit of vertical lines start kind of going kind of crazy sometimes this will this will fix that when you go to stabilize and we'll take care of it will compensate for that sometimes though, because it's like anything automated it's going to run away with with you it's like he got a wild horses on the other end and they're gone and you're there in the wagon um so you have to kind of go back and start over, so typically unless I know I've got some wonky stuff going on in there, I'm going to leave that off and I'm going to just have it analyze the position that the objects are moving the scale in case something scaling or or if there's there's anything like I'm panning up this thing, I'm not zooming in on it, but I am panning up it so things at the bottom that were really wide when I start end up coming tighter as I go up just because of the distortion of the camera itself and then rotation your cameras doing this I'm holding it by hand like this my hands are going to be doing this as I'm going up exaggerated, of course, but but but as I'm trying to hold it up it's going to rotate in the the cameras well, it's done while I'm sitting here blabbing so let's take a look and see how it did all on its own here we're gonna do a ram preview ran preview through this same way see that's a lot better maybe a little bit of distortion that's just cause a lens distortion now, if I wanted it to be even smoother I go appear to smoothness and I say let's, go to seventy percent. See what that does and we're going to let it go. We'll do a quick ram preview here. Nice and smooth. Even a little audio too, for that film. So this is great for anybody that's taking any kind of videos with your smart device on being able to pull those down and being double stabilizing that quick. So it's, just a matter of dump in your video and after effects adding the warp stabilizer plane with your smooth this amount, uh, and calling it good. Now I think I've got another example here that I did just a handheld. He sees this it here. No that's that one. Okay, let me see if I've got another one here. I just did these last night before turning in so let's see what? Which ones? This um oh, no that's another we'll use that one, maybe that'll work but the one I really wanted to use and I think I didn't copy it over and use it was just holding it still that's another thing that you get sometimes you just you're just trying to hold something still on somebody or something and you're trying to get that fixed location, but you're here or maybe you're up here trying to get, you know, the president he's over the crowd or whatever you're trying to get that, but you need it's crazy because you're doing this right? So you need to try to stabilize that well, instead of doing the smooth setting in here, you would choose smooth motion you go no motion, I can't do that with this one because obviously it's it's moving it's panning, but if I do know motion, then it's going to lock it down just like you're sitting on a tripod? And I'm telling you it does a beautiful job of that. I've done that several times, just even with handheld video cameras any time, says something's handheld or maybe you're on a roll, wonky tripod and somebody kicks it or it's the cameras, you know, twenty pounds, you've got an eight pound tripod I've never done that, but any I've heard people have done that so anyway, it's, it's, it's a wonderful, easy thing to do it's not scary at all oh, and another cool thing this is in premiere two as's well, so not premiere too but premier also so if you're in and premier just look up the work stabilizer and it will do the same thing same kind of controls and everything so either premier or after effects warp stabilizers really cool for that let me show you a couple before and afters here that I've done already so we saw the that one let me do this one here this is one they saw that preview part of the preview of the drone week uh workshop so this is before this is the raw before this's shot was just a phantom with a gopro on I can see the shadow down here right there there's the shadow of it there's me on the mezzanine they're controlling it and I'm just flying up this thing. It was a pretty windy day. We probably had about fifteen to eighteen knots go are not not what miles per hour I don't know how to measure not stand miles per hour not I'm not a, uh not a nautical guy so so that's that you can see it's kind of going on let me show it one more time without me happened you can see there's some stuff going on and there's lens distortion that's going back and forth and yeah it's an okay shot but it looks like it's shot with a little little quadcopter because it's whipping around it makes me dizzy and you want to throw up sorry about that everybody home that's just now coated their keyboard um I've got the that was the before clip let's look at the after clip and again this one I did use thie the subspace work I did allow it to do that because I knew there was lens distortion in there I knew was going to have to correct that so let's look and see how this looks nice and smooth I mean, that is that's a million dollar shot right there and again that's a little quadcopter with a gopro on it that you know looks like a million bucks to me looks like a big jim I mean, I've got a jib that's taller than the cream and that's really what that is that's exactly what that is and I was able to rotate the camera angle down some kind of keeping him and frame down there a bit and it just happened to get the time and we didn't stage this I just out flying around these guys and he happened to be pulling away right as that was my favorite shot of the day obviously, um that's almost like uh you know, launching rockets or something here it's pretty cool it's just work stabilizer it just it saves your bacon it's great. So it's good stuff. Um let's see here I've got let's look at this one. Yeah, I've got a few examples in this one as well. So let's take a look at this and these are all stabilize shots and some of these were shot. Um, actually, if the sun has already gone down so this is shot at dusk? Yeah, I wanted to get some lights also wanted to test the three plus and see how good it was that low light and it actually did pretty well. This is a little noisy because I converted it to hd two six four but you see the moon reflecting into the water there and flying around sail boats coming into the harbor. I loved seeing the moonlight reflecting into the water. It was just that was cool as fun, but again, these are all stabilized after the fact I only have a two axis gamble on that craft, so I don't have that third access that keeps it from going crazy. So again, same thing here smooths it all out. If this is all real time to these aren't slowed down, a lot of people slow down their footage, they'll shoot it sixty frames and slowed down to thirty or shooting thirty and slow down to fifteen or twelve just to make it look more slow mo this is this is all real time saw thirty frames per second I shoot everything like I say it was with the go pros I shoot everything two point seven k thirty frames per second and that gives me a lot of latitude for stabilizing and color and cropping anything I might want to do and so especially making moves with the copter to try to pan around a little bit fast there but still the stabilizer held on didn't look all wonky or shaky it just really did a nice job of stabilizing that that shot saved the shot you know, another one here no audio on this one thankfully because I'm people to talk about times they go um it just looks slow just because I've got I'm moving the copter fairly slow these trains aren't going very fast through here, so they're moving fairly slow so this isn't this is still full speed full full frame rate puff now little diesel smoke there. Oh yeah, I got some more there forgot I'm flying up above the cliffs in tunisia and I'm there with it some other flyers actually, a couple of these guys are going to be at my drone workshop with me um mark and romeo they've got some pretty wild uh custom custom copters they're gonna be flying too but there was a really windy day there too we're all there's another phantom out there flying um it's pretty windy and so there's a lot of that rocking motion that's going on we're able toe stabilized pretty good I mean still see a little bit of rocking through there but it does help some there a little bit of props dipping in there and I think that might be one of the last shots there can clothe and I think that's one more fly by everybody wave everybody's busy yeah he's shooting the edges there so ah, a little a little promo there for our our workshop coming up to actually so thiss one wass this one here I'm just going to run that through the process of real quick because this one is me grab that import file and, um get out here projects three and this one here. Okay, this I sent up let me actually give it its own calm that's another thing to do the work stabilizer even in premiere both premier and in aftereffects did use the work stabilizer it has to be in either a comp in aftereffects has to be an accomplice exact same size as the the file itself he can't nested inside something where you can't just add it to a comp that smaller and then resize it it has to be a cop that is the exact scale resolution frame rate everything of the original file so you just have to create a new calm for it ah and in premier you have to make a sequence that's matches the footage itself to use the word stabilizer because it is looking at the pixels data so I'm going tio run this on this one again I don't want subspace warp a lot scale rotation one thing is if I didn't uh if I didn't scale it or crop it and I just did position it gives you some pretty pretty funny results too because you're going what you're going to see is the image will be stabilized in the in the center because see this black border show up so it's kind of like having a a sheet of paper and then doing this with it you know is moving around but the images is there so you can see these black edges and it's going like that especially when the things rocking and swaying so if you don't crop it and you don't scale it to fill fill up then it's going to do that and it's going to be a little bit problematic so let's watch this for just a little bit here and see how it goes it'll pick up this may have been a little long of a clip to try to do this may cancel this because I don't want to sit here for half an hour to watch this let me do this real quick I'm going tio let me just hide after effects a little bit here just grabbed this clip this morning so let me just do one of these where um we're in a different different computer here so uh don't have seven never mind and question one of the quick one from the folks in the chat room what type of computer do you use to do this type of powerful stuff at home? Um well it just depends on where I'm at right uh sometimes I'm using the new imac fully loaded monster with thunderbolt everything and that's great I can do most everything I want with that um sometimes I got older I max sometimes I'm using my mac book air um I would love to get one of the new little trash can matt pros on dh but you know that's that's that's pretty hefty budget to get it the way I would like it you know it's kind of like saying well I'd love to have a jaguar but you know I wouldn't want a cheap old one I'd want the brand new one with all the features in it so by the time you know I would get one of those with the monitors and everything the way I'd like it I'm looking at you know, ten, twelve grand so I'm not doing that personally right now but maybe eventually I'm telling you the stuff that stuff that I'm able to do on on on the new twenty seven inch max. Um, just zane. If you've got a thunderbolt drive, um, attached. Especially if you have stds inside and you've got, or even the the hybrid drives or a thunderbolt with ssd external for your cashing that's. Just going to really speed things up. So it goes really, really, really quick. So, anyhow, I'm going to skip trying to analyze this one, it's, just a rotation around here. So they're going to rotate and crop it around the lake here. But I think we all pretty much get the idea of how the work stabilizer works.