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With the popularity of DSLR cameras
and the rise of mobile devices shooting incredible HD video,
we're seeing more HD content everywhere, and that's great.
But the issue is that most of the time, people who are shooting with those devices
aren't using any kind of a steady-cam rig.
They're not using dollies or tracks, and you end up with very shaky footage,
which can sometimes be less pleasing to the eye.
Case in point, we have a shot here in After Effects,
which was shot handheld--no dolly, no tripod, nothing--and it's okay,
but it's, indeed, a bit shaky.
So let's take a look at this.
So I'll do a quick RAM preview here.
Let's go full screen by hitting our tilde key.
And if we take a look at this footage, it's not bad, but very cleary it's handheld,
and for someone like me, it's making me a bit uneasy.
Well, stabilization and the ability to use stabilizers is not new to After Effects.
The thing is, it's hard to do, or it's been difficult to do,
and you really needed to know what you were doing to make the footage look good.
And just because you stablize something didn't mean that everything was still in the frame
and was pleasing to the eye.
It look a lot of time and effort to make something stabilized and look good.
Well now with the new warp stabilization effect and After Effect CS5.5,
I'm going to show you how we can take this handheld, shaky footage
and make it look like it was professionally shot with a dolly on a track
and make it very pleasing to the eye.
So let's go back here, and let's go up to our effects controls panel,
and I'm simply going to enable the Warp Stabilizer.
And you can see that we have all different types of stabilization options here,
one of them being Smooth Motion.
This will look if there's actually any motion on the clip or no motion at all.
We also have the ability to choose our method,
where we have Position, Scale, Rotation, Perspective, and Subspace Warp.
Now again, choosing the different types of methods here will give you different types of results.
The great thing is, I'm going to use defaults.
I'm going to stick with the defaults to show you the power of this effect.
Now one of the keys to doing successful stabilization is the cropping and framing,
and you can also see here that, under the framing options, we have the ability to Stabilize, Crop, and Auto-scale.
If I just turn this back to 25%, real quickly, this is automatically performing all three of these tasks.
If I just have it stablize only, this is what you would end up with.
So you can see what I was talking about.
This is great, and it's stabilized,
but somehow now we'd have to rescale this; we'd have to re-crop.
Now, we can let the Warp Stabilizer do it for you.
So we go ahead and choose Stabilize, Crop, Auto-scale.
Let's re-RAM preview this.
Let's go back to 50%.
Let's go full screen.
And now, what was once shaky looks beautiful.
It's fluid; it's steady.
And we literally used defaults to perform all of this.
Now why is this feature so great?
Well, on top of all of that, if you are a DSLR shooter,
you'll notice one particular feature here: Rolling Shutter Ripple.
Rolling shutter is a very common artifact present in all DSLR cameras,
and you can see that, by default, we have that set to automatic reduction.
So if you're experiencing rolling shutter, give it a try.
The effect will amaze you.
Now this is great by itself, but again, as an editor,
I'm probably going to be working in something like Premier Pro.
And I'm working on a shot, and I actually want to stabilize that shot.
So I want to be able to use the power of 64 bit between Premier Pro and After Effects,
stabilize the shot, and keep on working.
And of course you can do all of that with Dynamic Link.
So let's pop over to Premier, where I actually have a red clip.
You can see we have an R-3D clip.
Go ahead and bring this into the source monitor.
And if I go ahead and play this back, you can see that this too is, in fact, handheld.
So you're going to set a couple of in-points and out-points here--something like this.
Set an in--let's go about 2 seconds--2 1/2.
Set an out.
And then I can simply right-click on the clip here,
and using our new feature, New Sequence From Clip,
build a new sequence based on the attributes of that red clip directly--automatically.
Okay, so I cleary want to stabilize this shot.
Well now, very easily, I can simply right-click on this and choose to Replace With After Effects Composition.
It'll automatically build the After Effects comp for me.
Again, we can put this down to around 25%.
Let's go ahead and turn on our pixel-aspect ratio.
And now, I can simply take the Warp Stabilizer effect, drop over top of the clip,
and you can see that now it begins analyzing in the background--background processing, yes.
So while that continues to analyze, if I go back to Premier Pro,
now you can see inside the monitor in Premier,
it's analyzing, which means that I can go to another timeline, and I can still work.
I can cut; I can play; I can edit; I can do anything.
Leveraging Dynamic Link and leveraging the power of the Warp Stabilizer
between After Effects and Premier.
You can use the automatic settings--the default settings.
But of course with After Effects, you have all of those manual parameters to make it your own--
to really change and improve the look of the stabilization very easily, right out of the box.
It's the Warp Stabilizer and After Effects CS5.5.
