COW Blogs: Richard Harrington's Blog: Image Stabilization &Rolling Shutt er Reduction with After Effects CS5 inShare

With the release of After Effects 5.5, Adobe introduces an entirely new method for stabilizing footage that can also be useful to video editors. The War p Stabilizer can remove jitter caused by camera movement. The effect is very use ful as it can remove both unstable parallax type movements (where images appear to shift on planes). An extra benefit for those shooting with CMOS type sensors (such as those on DSLR cameras) is the ability to compensate for the rolling shu tter which can lead to an optical bending of material that has strong vertical l ines. 1. Select a clip in an After Effects composition. You can also send clips from A dobe Premiere Pro to After Effects via Dynamic Link. 2. Choose Animation >Stabilize Motion. The Warp Stabilizer effect is applied to the layer. The footage is immediately analyzed between its in and out-points. Th e analysis process takes two steps and you ll see a banner across the footage as i t s analyzed. You can also see a progress update in the Effect Controls panel. Whi le the analysis is in progress, you can keep working in the project. 3. You can enhance the effect with several useful options for the Stabilization Method: Result You can choose Smooth Motion to retain the general camera movement (albeit stabilized) or No Motion to attempt remove all camera movement. Smoothness This option specifies how much of the original camera movement should be retained for Smooth Motion. Use a higher value for maximum smoothness. Method There are four methods available. The two most powerful are Perspective a nd Subspace Warp. If either method creates too much distortion you can try switc hing to Position, Scale and Rotation or just Position. If you want to see just how much the stabilizer is actually doing, set the Frami ng to Stabilize Only. This will show you black around the edges. If the motion l ooks unnatural, you can always adjust the Smoothness settings. 4. You can also control how the borders are drawn for the effect. With the Frami ng pop-up you can choose to simply stabilize the shot. You can also tell After E ffects to automatically scale or even synthesize new edge content.

5. If you see vertical distortion or warping in the shot, enable the Rolling Shu tter Ripple option under the Advanced category. In order to use these advanced o ptions you need to use either the Subspace Warp or Perspective method for Stabil ization. Be sure to experiment with both methods as the choice may vary based on the source footage.nIf you want maximum stabilization quality you can choose th e Detailed Analysis option under the Advanced category. This makes the Analysis phase do extra work to find elements to track. This option is much slower, but p roduces superior results.

6. Use the RAM preview option to preview the effect as needed.