Hi Guys! Jordan with Motion Array, and today we want to take your footage from this, to
this, without doing this.
We’re taking an in-depth look at the warp stabilizer tool in premiere pro!
Okay so the first thing to note is that warp stabilizer is a crazy powerful tool!
It can really do a lot to take your footage to another level of quality.
But just remember.
1.
It’s not perfect - and
2 it will only do what you tell it to do
And a lot of people just drag and drop warp stabilizer onto their footage and then wonder
why they don’t get a perfect stabilization?
It’s because the default settings might not be the best for your specific shot.
So let’s jump into Premiere and take a look at how to approach this effect!
Cool so we’re here in premiere pro and we have our footage on the timeline.
We can see right off the bat that our footage is a little bit shaky, so we’re gonna start
by adding the warp stabilizer effect.
We do this by dragging and dropping the effect onto our footage.
To do that just go to our effects panel here, and then type in warp stabilizer.
Now we drag and drop.
Off the bat you’ll see that it starts to analyze your clip.
And if you look over here in effect controls, you can see a readout of how many frames your
clip has, how many it’s analyzed, the percentage it’s through analyzing your clip, and it
will also go back and forth every few seconds showing you how much time the analysis has
left.
You don’t have to wait till it’s finished to start making some adjustments, and in fact,
some adjustments to the parameters will cause the analyzation to start over again.
So it’s good to get your parameters set right off the bat.
So how do we know what to do?
Well let’s start by asking if you want your footage to have smooth motion or no motion.
For our clip here, we want smooth motion.
This is because the camera is actually moving a considerable amount of distance and we actually
want to see that movement, we just want to take the jitters and shakes out.
So to start, make sure this box here is set for smooth motion.
This is a good option to use for any clip that has simple motion with a little bit of
movement that you want to just settle down.
Here’s a good example of a clip that would work well.
The other option for no motion is intended for if you want your clip to remain completely
still.
This is more for a clip where you want to make it look like a tripod shot but you filmed
it more or less handheld.
Here just choosing no motion can give you shot that looks like it’s completely still.
Even if there’s a lot of movement, as long as there’s not a lot of parallax in the
shot warp stabilizer can do an amazing job making it look like there’s no motion.
depending on what's in your clip, this actually might go more to the extreme
and in this example its cropped in our video a lot!
Getting no motion is pretty straightforward, but getting smooth motion needs a little more
finessing. because there's a lot of situations you could be faced with
So let’s go back to this clip here and figure out how to get specific smooth motion now.
So we can see here that right under our smooth motion option is a percentage for smoothness.
Basically what this is is a range going from 0 - 100% in terms of the smoothness you want
to implement onto your clip.
Bringing it down to zero will make your footage indistinguishable from the original and in
our case, pretty shaky.
But the more we increase it from 5%, to 25%, to 50%, we can see that our clip gets more
and more smooth each time.
But we can also see that our clip gets more cropped in the more smooth we tell the clip
to be.
We can see that the same functionality can be found here under the advanced tab beside
crop less - smooth more. It works in very much the same way.
But we’ll come back to the advanced section later.
Stabilization Method
Next we have the method section where you can select what method of stabilization you
want your clip to go through.
There’s 4 to choose from.
Position simple accounts for movements going
in any direction up, down, left, or right.
Position, Scale, Rotation This option allows the clip to be analyzed
for each of the position, scale, and rotation movements that warp stabilizer can detect,
and can counteract these movements.
Perspective Perspective is the first of these that will
start to introduce true “warping” as it essentially uses a corner-pin-like effect
to stretch the overall image to make the stabilization less mechanical and more fluid.
For me this is where I start see a lot of the jitters taken out of a shot.
Subspace Warp Finally subspace warp is the default parameter
for your stabilization method.
Unless your clip has very basic motion you want to correct for, subspace warp will likely
give you the most desired result as it analyzes the whole clip and warps specific portions
to make the motion of the clip as smooth as possible.
There’s a reason that this is the default choice, but because it’s not magic, there
are certain things that will really make your subspace warp look like garbage.
And one of those is lens flare as you can see in this example.
Its also important to remember that with perspective ans subspace warp
The more you try and push the smoothness, the more likely your footage will look like jello
Next is the Borders Section where we can talk
about the only parameter we can adjust which is the framing.
Again there are 4 options that we can choose from.
Stabilize Only This will effectively stabilize your clip,
but none of the cropping will be applied so you’ll start to get black edges on the outside
of your clip and in extreme cases you’ll actually start to see how the effect is manipulating
your clip to stabilize it.
It’s interesting, but rarely the effect you want to go for.
Stabilize and Crop This option will take any of the bad or moving
edges of your frame and crop them in, but it will leave you with a black border around
your clip, to fix this, either manually adjust your scaling or go onto the next option which
is.
Stabilize, Crop, and Auto-Scale This will tell warp stabilizer to automatically
detect the amount of scaling it will require to get your clip down to where the stabilization
doesn’t negatively impact the edge of your clip frame.
This is what your effect will likely be set to by default, and in my opinion it has given
me consistently the best result.
But there’s one more option.
Stabilize, Synthesize Edges This option will literally tell warp stabilizer
to look at the edge of your frame and re-create the portions that are missing by artificially
constructing it’s best guess of what should be there.
This effect has mixed results with many users and takes a significant amount of computer
power and time to complete.
You should stay away from this option unless you either have a very powerful computer or
you have a strong understanding of premiere pro.
Auto-Scale
Maximum Scale Next down the line we have auto-scale.
What this does is gives warp stabilizer a maximum threshold to not go beyond in terms
of how much it can scale up your clip to help with stabilization.
We can see here that our max is set for 150%, and our clip autoscale is at 106.4%
So if we bring our max down to 106%.
We can see that warp stabilizer respects our maximum scaling and does as much as we allow
it to.
But if we bring it up to 109% now.
We can see that it still chooses to auto-scale only to 106.4%.
Action-Safe Margin The action-safe margin simply adds a safe
border around your clip which is excluded from the auto-scaling trying to fill.
Additional Scale And lastly additional scaling is a parameter
you can control yourself as well as keyframe to scale in more, or less of your clip.
But that’s not quite it, we just a couple more parameters to look at underneath the
advanced section
Advanced Section
Detailed Analysis Starting it off we have detailed analysis.
What this does is tells warp stabilizer to take more time and look for more points within
the video to make adjustments.
This will take a little bit more time, and it’s possible that after this you won’t
see any distinguishable difference.
But if you want to make sure you’re getting the absolute best possible stabilization I
would highly recommend selecting detailed analysis.
Rolling Shutter Ripple By default rolling shutter ripple is set to
automatic reduction to take out any gross rippling that comes from rolling shutter.
Rolling shutter if you don’t know is when you have a lot of skewing and bending taking
place in your video because the of rapid camera motion.
You can see here that the actual way the buildings look gets bent and skewed before returning
to normal.
If you’ve got a lot of this in your shot go ahead and set it to enhanced reduction
Crop Less - Smooth More
Crop less and smooth more is what we went over previously.
Again just a recap that this can almost act as a slider between how close to the original
you want your clip to look and how much do you want to crop in as a result of stabilization.
Synthesis Controls And now we have the synthesis controls which,
we won’t get into very deep because chances are you won’t be using them.
But in case you want to venture just know that you can only use them when your framing
option is set to synthesize edges.
From here you can control how many seconds before and after each frame the effect will
search in order to determine how to construct newly created pixels to fill in black gaps.
Likewise the synthesis edge fether will let you blend in the effect a little bit by feathering
it with the original.
And edge cropping simply lets you crop out any bad pixelation you get on the edges to
help make the effect look better overall.
Hide Warning Banner
And finally we have the hide warning banner section where we can simply hide it if you
don’t want to see it.
Simple as that.
And that’s all of the different parameters that you can use to make your warp stabilization
better!
But lastly, every so often, you’ll end up being greeted by a screen like this.
So what’s going on?
Well the red banner is telling you that warp stabilizer can’t run on your clip the way
it’s currently set up.
You’ll either get this banner that says “Warp stabilizer requires clip dimensions
to match” or “Warp Stabilizer and Speed can’t be used on the same clip”.
Either way, the solution is the same.
You need to nest your clip before adding warp stabilizer in each situation.
To do that, right click on your clip and go to nest.
This will give you a pop up where you can name your clip.
Then when you hit ok your clip will look a little bit different.
It’s a nested sequence which basically means there’s a clip inside this clip.
If you double click it, you can see the original clip with the original changes done to it,
and all those changes still take place when you come back out into the main sequence,
only now you can add your warp stabilizer effect!
And guys I hope that helps you use warp stabilizer just a little bit better in your next video!
If you liked this video!
Hit the like button, subscribe or even share this video with a fellow video editor friend!
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If you’re interested, the link is in the description below!
But that’s it for me guys!
And I hope to see you in the next video!