From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Stabilize a shot - Media Composer Tutorial

From the course: Media Composer 2020 Essential Training: 101 Fundamentals 1

Start my 1-month free trial

Stabilize a shot

- If you are working with handheld footage, it's quite possible you're going to want to stabilize a shot either by smoothing out the movement of the camera or really locking it down as if the camera were on a tripod. Media Composer has an effect to help with this and it's called the stabilize effect. And by the way before I get into these controls, if you have downloaded the assets associated with this course, you can go to the Tools Menu and bring up the Markers window to see each of the Markers that are assigned to this sequence and locate the shots we're going to work on pretty quickly. The one I want right now is this the stabilize smooth marker, which is number five. I'm going to double click it to jump to that Marker and close this window. This shot is okay, but it is a little bit wobbly. I want to play through it, but the music kind of loud in this sequence so I'm going to mute the music track, and then I'll just play through this so you can see what it looks like. (wind whooshing) So it looks okay but I want to draw your attention right now to this watermark and how stable that is in the shot of course it's completely rock solid because it's overlaid on the footage. To apply these stabilize effect, I'm going to drag it onto the clip segment and a couple of things happen. This Tracking Window opens up and Media Composer begins analyzing the shot to identify areas of the image that perhaps could be smoother than they are. In addition, the stabilize effect, which is now applied to the clip, has some settings adjusted. Those settings are based on the tracking information that was established in this Tracking Window. If I switch, let me just drag the play-head back a little bit in the preview monitor, which is what we're getting right now in the Composer window, because we've got the effect settings on screen. If I switch the display menu in the Tracking Window to the tracking data rather than the effect results, you can see this line indicating the original location of the items on screen. Media Composers tracked automatically, it's tracked visually to identify what's going on in order to smooth out the shot. So let's switch this back to effect results and I'll close the Tracking Window. And now if I just drag back to the beginning of the shot and play through, let's see how it compares. (wind whooshing) - That is a fair bit smoother and perhaps the best indication is how much this watermark is moving in the shot, moving quite a bit to compensate for the wobble in the original camera movement. If I go into the Stabilize settings in Effect Editor, I can turn off scaling and position so you can see how this was originally, and if I turn these options back on, these are just on, off switches in the Effect Editor window. If I drag through now, you can see this white outline that represents the original frame of the footage, and you can see how much that's wobbling. I'm going to click the reduce button here so you can see it even more clearly as I scrub through the shot. And you can see how the edge of the frame of the clip is moving dramatically relative to the edge of the sequence frame. I'll just click to enlarge and bring us back to full size. You may find when stabilizing a shot that you want to go into these settings displayed in the Effect Editor and make some fine tune adjustments. You might want to scale in even more, add a crop, or even if you're placing this shot within the frame, add a border and a background color as well so it becomes a kind of picture in picture. One of the best ways to work out what each of the controls do in the Effect Editor is to just drag them from one extreme to the other. You'll notice when I click on this though, I get a warning saying that this is going to conflict with the automatic zoom control, I click okay, that's fine and drag this up. You can see exactly what's going on here. I'll just undo using Control + Z and we're back to our stabilized shot. Because you can always undo, it's usually safe to experiment with the settings in the Effect Editor.

Contents