- The other day, I posted this video of a hummingbird
over on Instagram, showing off the power of the tracker
and stabilization inside DaVinci Resolve.
And it didn't take long after I posted it
for a bunch of people to reach out
and ask me to do a tutorial.
This type of stabilization is a little bit different
than what you might use if you just had
a little bit of a shaky camera shot.
It's definitely a bit more of an extreme effect,
where you want to keep your subject
in one place in the frame at all times.
It's probably most well known at this point
from the commercials where they would lock onto an earbud
in someone's ear while they were jumping or running,
but I also use the exact same effect
for a different part of this video
that I'll show you as well.
So secure the cup, let's hop into DaVinci Resolve,
and I'll show you how I did it.
(upbeat music)
All right, so here we are in DaVinci Resolve.
We can see the finished product
over here on the left-hand side.
This bottom part is just the music
that I imported from Instagram Reel,
so that I would have something to edit to.
On the top here, we've got "THE POWER OF STABILIZATION"
in DaVinci Resolve and "STABILIZED",
so you know when the stabilization kicks in.
So those are just titles.
They're not really important right now.
And then below here, we've got just duplicated clips
and I'll show you why we do that in a little bit.
Now, if we scroll over here,
we can see the original clip quite a bit zoomed out here.
And if I play it,
you'll notice it's not actually, like, camera shake.
It's just that tree swaying back and forth
that was causing the shakiness of the clip
that we're gonna stabilize out.
So the first thing that we're gonna do
is hop into Fusion with this clip.
You can either click on this as long as you're selected
and your playhead is on it.
You can just click straight on the Fusion button
or you can right-click on the clip
and go "Open in Fusion Page".
Now, it might look a little bit different.
That's because Fusion happens
before the color grading in the process.
That clip that I had in the Edit page is color-graded.
But because you can see here's the Edit, here's Fusion,
and then here's the Color Grade,
so where we're looking at it in the process,
it's still not color-graded yet,
but that's not gonna affect us at all.
Now, what we're seeing at the bottom here is basically
our MediaIn1, which is the clip itself, then our MediaOut1.
And that's basically saying,
"This is what's going back to the timeline."
We're gonna hit Shift + Space,
and then I'm gonna search for "tracker".
And with "MediaIn1" selected,
if I hit Add, it should add the tracker in our chain.
Then, this little thing popped up on our screen here.
You can see, it's a little green box.
And we're just gonna take that
and place it over top of our bird.
On the right hand side here,
if you're not seeing this menu,
you can click Inspector in the top right.
We can see what's inside that box.
So, all I want to do is kind of widen this box a little bit.
If you wanna move it, it's this little tiny square
in the top left corner of the box.
And then there's this surrounding box as well,
this kind of dotted line.
And what that's telling it is
that we want to search for this area within the outer area.
So it's looking for the bird inside anywhere of here.
So if the bird happens to move, which we know it will,
then it's going to search within that outer bounds
for the bird.
Now, because I found my tracking point
in the middle of the clip here,
see how the red line is in the middle,
it's not over at the start.
I'm actually gonna track backwards to start with.
This does take some time, but I'll speed it up a little bit
so you don't have to wait through the whole thing.
Then we're gonna go back to where we started here
and we're gonna track forward.
The other thing you can do
if you want to speed this up a little bit
is you can try to make your box smaller.
If it's got less size to search, it takes less time.
So we're done there.
We've got our whole thing tracked.
And if we play this back through,
we can watch that little green box
and it follows the bird perfectly.
Now, just a quick disclaimer.
It's not always as perfect of a track as this one was,
but if you've got a relatively simple shot
with good contrast like this one,
you can see the bird against
the simple background like that is good contrast,
then Fusion does an absolutely fantastic job
at nailing it on the first try.
Okay, so the next thing that we want to do here
is we want to go over into our Inspector
and we're gonna choose Operation.
We're gonna change the Operation to Match Move,
and then all we're gonna do is we're gonna click BG only.
And then when we play it back,
you'll notice that the frame is moving around a whole bunch,
leaving the bird steady in the center.
And the issue with this right now
is that you can see it's losing space on the side.
We're actually getting blank parts of the frame
because it's keeping our subject in the same spot.
So what we're gonna have to do is basically just zoom in
or crop in enough so that we never hit that edge piece,
which in this case is totally fine
because I wanted to zoom in a bunch anyway,
to get a little bit closer on the hummingbird.
But it's something to keep in mind,
if you're planning to do this effect
to shoot a little wider than you think you need,
so you've got that extra space.
Now, there are two ways that we can accomplish this.
A lot of people will go Shift + Space bar,
and then they will search for "transform".
They'll add a Transform into the chain after the Tracker,
and then we can just bump up the size here.
I'm actually gonna do it slightly differently.
I'm just gonna go back into my Edit page.
I'm gonna open my Inspector here.
And with that clip selected,
I'm actually going to zoom it in here.
I'm gonna go two times, and then I'm just gonna get
my hummingbird nice and centered here.
There we go.
And now, once this blue bar is fully loaded,
you can see we now have the whole clip
where the hummingbird is pretty darn centered.
So now we've got the final stabilized version,
but in the Reel that I put out,
the first half of it wasn't stabilized
and we had this little title on here.
So what we're gonna do
is I'm actually gonna grab this.
Holding Option, I'm gonna drag up
and that's gonna duplicate it.
And then what I want to do is actually
trim this to the halfway point
and we're gonna open this one in the Fusion page.
Now, because we already have the Tracker on there,
we're good to go on that.
So the tracking information is exactly the same,
but we're gonna go back into Operation
and we're gonna change this to FG over BG.
Now what we're gonna do is go back
to the very start of the clip.
I'm gonna make sure I'm not selected on any of these
and I'm going to choose a Text tool.
Highlighting that text tool and going over to our Inspector,
I'm gonna type "Watch The Hummingbird".
And if I select the Text again and hit 1,
we'll be able to see a preview of it here,
so I can choose a text to use, change the color.
And then what I want to do is take the output of it
and put it into the green arrow.
That's gonna be our foreground.
Now I can move it to where I want it in the frame.
Gonna change the size a little bit,
remembering that this is gonna get a lot bigger
when it zoomed in on the Edit page.
And then, I also want to create an arrow.
So all I'm gonna do is click off of that Text again.
I'm gonna choose a Background.
I'm gonna hit 1 so that I can see
what I'm looking at over here.
And then with the Background selected,
I'm gonna choose a Polygon.
I'm sure there are easier ways to make an arrow,
but that's the way I know how.
And then, all I'm gonna do is drag
from the output of the Background
to the output of the Text,
and it'll automatically merge them together.
Now I just need to go back to my Polygon,
bring the size down quite a bit,
change that border width 'cause now it's a little too much.
Just gonna move things around a little bit here.
There we go, and now clicking back on that Tracker.
Remember, before I changed this from BG only
so that the tracker was only moving
what was in the background input,
which is our clip of our hummingbird
going into the yellow arrow here,
but now we've got our text and our arrow
going into the foreground.
So if we change this to FG over BG,
now what happens is that the text and the arrow
are going to move according to the tracking
that we got from the bird.
So it should move right alongside.
Let's go back into the Edit page here.
And then again, because we did our zoom and our position
in the Edit page, you can see that it's way zoomed in
when we play it back.
The text and the arrow are locked on with the bird.
And then the only other thing that I really did in this clip
is that where the stabilization kicks in,
I just matched this first clip along with
where the stabilization happens.
So if I bring my opacity of that top layer down to 50%
and I can just kinda line these up,
and then turn my opacity all the way back up.
And now we've got this.
And the stabilization kicks in at that halfway point.
And that's the Reel.
All right. I hope that was super helpful
and that this effect is something
that you might be able to use in some of your own projects
to add some interest into those shots.
If you have any questions or you need clarity,
don't hesitate to ask down in the comments.
And while you're down there, let me know
is this actually something that you would use
in one of your projects?
And on your way down, make sure to hit
that Like and Subscribe button.
Hit the bell notification so you don't miss out
on future reviews and tutorials.
Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time.
(upbeat music)