Video Stabilizer

I have a 20 year old video where the camera was so heavy I could barely keep it on the subject. I realize I will get the black bars and need to crop and was hoping Topaz Stabilizer would help. Sadly I didn’t see any difference.

Could it be my footage is too poorly shot? I get ok results from AE stabilizer but it is very tedious and often loses motion tracker when the camera and subject move too abruptly.

Any suggestions?

pleae upload a stippet so we can test it too!

Hi! For very shaky footage I’d also recommend trying the ‘Auto-Crop’ mode in the Stabilization menu, this will cut off the edges of the frame but allow for more stabilization since the app will be able to shift the center of the frame around to compensate for motion.

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Here is the file. When you see it you will realize my challenges. First note it was shot while I was young and unable to carry such a big video camera.

I’m trying to stabilize on a still shot. Yes, I know that I will get blank areas where I went completely off frame.

Boris FX has an interesting stabilizer but no luck with that either.

Let me know your thought after reviewing the footage

Also I tried cutting up the file to have the model focus on the consistent person in each stabilization shot. Still no dice.

This didn’t do anything.

Here is my attempt: Desktop 2023 05 11 07 55 56 02 - YouTube

One thing that you can try is to attempt an iterative process.
First stabilize just a little, the whole frame (5% or so).
Then get the result and stabilize it some more.
Keep doing that until you get stabilization artifacts at the edges, at which point you can introduce cropping appropriately.
Your footage is not that difficult to correct to a satisfying degree.
Cutting the footage to segments and treating them separately is also a good idea, since you can control the iterations for each one separately.

In general TVAI is not exactly plug and play, at least it is not yet. It requires some work and experiment but eventually you can get good results.

Also do not use motion deblur at the same time you try to stabilize because you are introducing one extra thing that you have to worry about. You should attempt motion deblur /upscaling and so on, on the final stabilized footage.