Click on any phrase to play the video from that point.
[In this movie, we will be covering: setting up a double-wide composition comparison,]
[searching for effects, applying Warp Stabilizer,]
[Smooth Motion versus No Motion, setting the smoothness amount]
The headline new feature After Effects CS5.5 is definitely the new Warp Stabilizer Effect.
It differs from traditional stablization in a few different ways.
One: you can decide whether or not the resulting shot is completely locked off and stable,
or whether it retains some fo the original camera motion.
You can even dial in how much smoothness you want in that motion.
Secondly,it has several different ways to stabilize a shot.
In addition to position, scale, rotation or corner pinning, it can actually warp the footage
and even treat the foreground differently than the background.
Thirdly, it has several different options for how it scales and crops the image.
Normally, with stabilization you need to scale up the footage to make it refill the frame after you've stabilized it.
Well, the Warp Stabilizer has the ability to synthesize new edges
by looking earlier and later, in time, to see if it can find some pixels to fill in the missing gaps.
And fourth, it's mostly automatic.
In the vast majority of cases, you don't need to do anything.
You don't need to set up a tracking region--it'll do all the tracking for you.
Now, I'm going to cover the Warp Stabilizer in four different movies.
In this one, I'm going to be covering the instant gratification approach.
Slap it on any piece of footage. See how it works.
Decide in between a locked off shot and a smooth-moving camera shot.
In the second one, I'm going to show you how to go a little bit further with that,
try out the different stabilization techniques, and also explore the different edge crop techniques.
In the third movie, I'm going to get into the advanced parameters.
And to a large degree, that's the synthesized edges--
the ability to fill in new information around the edges when the camera went slightly off frame.
And in the fourth movie, I'm going to be tackling a special case that normally would trip up Warp Stabilizer,
but once you know how it's working internally,
you can go ahead and do a little bit of prep work
to make it fix even difficult shots.
So with all that, let's dive in and have some fun!
I'm in After Effects CS5.5, also known as version 10.5,
and I'm going to open up a CS5 project from our book, "Creating Motion Graphics."
This is the example project from the chapter on motion stabilization.
When I do so, it gives me the usual message that I'm going to upgrade this project
from an older version, 10.0-- which was CS5, into the new version, 10.5.
I click OK. I'm going to start with the Comp EX 01A starter.
I'll press Zero on the numeric keypad for Quick RAM Preview.
and you can see that this was a hand-held shot and is, indeed, a bit on the shaky side.
In addition to that, it looked like the camera operator was trying to decide exactly what they wanted to frame.
Did they want to center this person trying to dig his car out?
Or did they want to create some more space here on the right to see the cars entering the frame?
They weren't sure.
Well, let's make him seem a little bit more sure what he was going to do.
I'd like to compare a stabilized and unstabilized version side by side.
To do that, I'm going to go to the Composition, Settings, and Create a double-wide comp.
I'll make sure lock aspect ratio is tuned off,
click on the Current Width,
and I'll take advantage of After Effects being able to to math functions.
Do times 2 to create a 14/40 wide comp.
Now, you might have noticed that it has centered my previous footage
in the middle of my new composition width.
But what I want is for this video to be justified off to one side.
That's simple--I'll go to the Advance tab and take advantage of anchor to say
"Justify all my existing footage to this left side of the composition."
Click OK, take this layer, duplicate it just like the one on the bottom,
drag it to the right,
and take advantage of another shortcut:
A Hold Command+Shift on MAC or Control+Shift on Windows
to make my layer snap to the boundaries of the composition.
So now I have two copies.
I'll select the layer on the left and I want to apply the brand new Warp Stabilizer.
The problem is, it's brand new.
I don't know which effect category it's under.
Now, I might not even remember that it's called Warp Stabilizer.
Well, I'll go to the Effects and Presets panel and start typing in "Stable"
Ah--there it is: Warp Stabilizer, underneath the Distort menu.
It's a 32-bit effect, which means it works in floating point mode as well.
I'll drag it on to my footage.
Now the first thing you notice is After Effects automatically starts analyzing the footage.
It says in the background I can, indeed, go open up, say another composition
if I wanted to,then come back to this current comp,
and it'll still be analyzing.
I'll bring the Effect Control Panel forward,
and you can see, it's counting off the frames as it's busy analyzing.
When it's done analyzing, then it stabilizes the shot, and that step happens a lot faster.
All of that data, analyzing the movement of these pixels from frame to frame
and the stabilization data, is saved with the Warp Stabilizer Effect.
With the layer selected, I'll press U and Reveal No Key Frames.
There are none of the normal motion tracker stabilizer key frames with the Warp Stabilizer.
It's all stored in the Effect.
And, by the way, that internal data will inflate the size of your project file a little bit
but we're talking megabytes here, not gigabytes or anything like that.
Okay, let's go ahead in RAM Preview and compare these two shots side by side.
I'll press Zero, let them queue up,
and now we see these two shots.
The one on the right is the original and you can see the amount of bounce and uncertainty.
And the one on the left is a stabilized shot.
A much smoother, camera pan from this person being centered to seeing the cars enter from the right.
If you want to get a clue as to just how much stabilization is going on,
look at this little burn-in on the footage and you'll see how much that's bouncing around.
That's the amount of bounce and jitter the Warp Stabilizer is taking out of this shot.
You've got a couple of choices.
You can go ahead and say Smooth Motion
or No Motion Whatsoever--I select that--it does not have to analyze,
but it does need to re-stabilize a shot--which, again, happens relatively fast.
I'll press Zero to RAM Preview,
and now I have a locked down shot
And, again, I didn't have to do much.
I just basically dragged Warp Stablilizer on to this clip
and, no, I've not spent hours trying to find a clip that this works on.
It actually does work pretty darn well on a large variety of footage.
Anyway, you know--lock down camera shots are just so cable TV-in-the-past.
I like Smooth Motion.
But maybe I don't like quite as much motion.
Okay, I'll just increase the amount of smoothness--maybe 200 percent.
Or I can go beyond 100, say to 150, to really cut down on the camera movement.
Press Enter. It restabilizes the shot.
Press Zero to RAM Preview.
And now I have an even more gradual camera pan from this person being centered
to seeing what's happening on the right side of the screen.
If that's too smooth I'll just go to a smaller value, like only 25 percent stable.
Zero to Ram Preview.
And now you see I've got a little more of the up movement here at the end of the shot,
and a little bit more of the natural camera drift that was in the original footage.
I'll go back to 50.
And that's the instant gratification approach to using the Warp Stabilizer.
It really is that simple.
However, if you have a tricky shot
it is worth learning what the individual paramaters
particularly in the advanced section do.
And that's what I'll cover in the next movies.
