Welcome to another in a series of Premiere Pro tutorials from San Diego video production company, BizVid Communications. I think we have all shot video in the hand held mode and found the result to be a little shaky. Well, prior to the release of Premere Pro CS6, the only way to correct an unsteady shot was in After Effects.
Take a look at this clip. It was obviously not shot on a tripod. But I want it to look like it was. I can do that by using the Warp Stabilizer effect in Premiere Pro. First, I’ll position my mouse in the search window of the effects panel and type, “warp” and before I finish, Premier will bring it up and, as you can see, it is listed in the “Distort” category. Next, I’ll click and drag the effect onto the clip and when I do, this blue bar appears. This means that it has begun to analyze. This particular clip is about 4 seconds long it’s going to take between five and ten times longer than the clips real time, to analyze and figure out all of the algorithms in order to make the correction.
What it’s doing is looking at how the pixels are moving from one frame to the other. Miraculously, it figures out the center of the shot, then re-configures the pixels so that the image remains steady on that center point. It does this only once meaning that you don’t have to re-do it every time you open the project, unless of course, you remove the effect and then re-apply it.
Okay, the stabilization has been completed as you will see as I play this back. The effect is just like a stabilizer on a cruise ship. When the ship rocks to the right, the stabilizer takes it back to the left…but, so subtle that you don’t detect the ships motion. Same with the video clip…if it goes up, “Warp Stabilizer” brings it down, etc.
As you will see here, there are several choices for stabilization…but I find that “stabilize for position” yields the best results and I can “smooth motion” or I can say, “no motion” where it will lock the center of the clip in place. Here’s what I mean. As you can see with the black bars, the picture is stabilized quite a bit. So let’s get rid of the bars. I position my mouse on “stabilize, crop and autoscale” and there you have it.
While there is still a little motion left, the shot is much better than it was when we began. Warp Stabilizer, a great tool. Be sure to watch other BizVid tutorials found in our blog, BizVidCommunications.com/blog or visit our YouTube channel at YouTube.com/BizVidCommunications and subscribe. Thanks for watching.