Hey guys, this is Adam Shomsky and in this tutorial I'm going to show you some advanced techniques for stabilizing a hyperlapse so first thing I'm going to do is double click here on my project window to open up and to import some images I'm going to import some images of Hyperlapse I shot at the supreme court and since I have my images stored as a named as numbered sequence It's automatically going to select JPG sequence here, so when I hit open it's going to be a sequence of images So I'm going to drag this down and to create a new sequence button and It's going to pop [up] and if I ctrl k I can see the settings of this one this is 5184 by 3456 this is a 18 megapixel image, and that's the size of my sequence here so this hyperlapse is A little tricky because at this point Here the there's a tree that comes right [through] the middle of the image, and it blocks the background, and there's no single Tracking point I can pick anywhere on this image that is going to be Available in every frame because this tree gets in the way so first thing I like to do is always do I always just try [to] run warp Stabiliser and Just see if it's going to work, so let's try that out and just see what happens Okay, so warp stabilizer actually does a pretty decent job It's not too bad it gets a little wobbly when it goes behind the tree there See that damn tree screws up warp Stabiliser Just like it's going to screw us up when we try to manually stabilize So if I was going to keep warp stabilizer what I would want to do is I'd want to do stabilize only I don't want it cropping and auto scaling so by default the Stabilization method chosen is [subspace] warp But there's also some other options in here subspace warp sometimes produces some weird artifacts like I'll show you an example of a case where? It's producing all kinds of Jell-O type warping artifacts on the screen so if I was going to use this as my jumping-off point to do some manual stabilization afterward I usually disable Subspace warp Just because if it produces those jello effects then it could be really hard [to] get rid of it So I would choose position scale and rotation see now there seems to be some Jitters here in the Scaling which I don't I don't care for it might be kind of difficult to fix that. warp stabilizer has Introduced some scaling disturbances here right when it goes behind the tree It seems like it's rescaling it unfortunately. I think this is a really Annoying feature I cannot tell warp stabilizer to do Position and rotation only without doing the scale and I find that sometimes warp stabilizer introduces scaling that I don't want But if I could just select position, there's all kinds of rotation wobbles in there And it positioned by itself doesn't do much if you have [a] lot of rotation wobbles, so this is not really helping me so I could choose to do position scale and rotation and stabilize only and Take this output and then put it into my next step and try to manually stabilize from there, but in this case I think I'm just going to delete warp stabilizer and start fresh and do a manual [stabilisation] starting out Also sometimes warp stabilizer produces just terrible results that are totally unusable So I'll show you how to start stabilizing from scratch So if you don't have the tracker panel down here go to window and select tracker and it should pop [up] and then I'm going to select track motion so I'm going to show you three different ways that you can deal with this kind of Stabilization because as I mentioned there's no single tracking point I can pick here that's going to be in every single frame So I'm gonna have to do something special to To deal with this tree. I'm going to show you three different ways to do it So here's the first one and the first one I'm going to do it in two stages first [I'm] going to do position tracking and then rotation tracking separately so the advantage of that is when you're doing position tracking you only have to pick one point if you're going to do position and Rotation in one stage you [have] to pick two Points in every frame and can be more challenging [to] find a suitable tracking point or set of tracking points rather so in this case let me go back and change my Resolution to full so that this image is sharp. I'm going to drag my tracking point I think a good tracking point is going to be the peak of The Roof here, which is visible in most of the frames even though? It's partially obscured here You can still pretty much tell where it is So the tracking point is going to look for an image that looks like this Which isn't very helpful because there's these branches in the way, and it's going to look for it within this larger bounding box That's at the bounding boxes are for here So [I'm] on frame 1 let me click this down so I can see my I'd like to see which [Keyframes] I've already used I'm just going to make sure [that] this tracking point stays on the peak the building in each frame And I'm using the analyze one frame forward button to move forward one frame at a time Also, there's the analyze forward button which will keep on moving until you stop it So until I get four out from behind this tree the automatic picking is going to have a tough time figuring this out So now it's figuring it out pretty well oops, so when I see that it's gone off track, and you just need to stop it with the [spacebar] or with the analyze Forward Button will turn into a Stop button [and] just make sure I get it back on track and then it can process forward again Okay, so now I've reached the point where my tracking point has gone behind this tree it's somewhere back here and For the next few frames I can page [down] and look at the next few frames It's visible and that one, but there's several in a row here where I'm not going to be able to see it So what I want to do here is this keyframe is bad. I'm going to delete that Keyframe so I'm just going to expand this and Select this Keyframe Data and delete it [and] so at this point This is the last good keyframe I can get out of this tracking point So now I'm gonna have to pick a new tracking point but I can't just move this one because obviously it's tracking a particular point in space, so I'm going to do a New [stabilize] motion and it's going to give me tracker [2] I'm going to pick position again. Just position [so] now I have to pick a new point and I want to pick a point It's going to be [available] for the next few frames, so I'm going to go somewhere over here Top of this pillar somewhere like right here. Maybe I don't want to pick something. That's too far off center because whoops because this lens is kind of a [wide-angle] lens, and there there's some distortion, [especially] near the edges of the lens and I don't want to be too far away from the center of the image, so I'm going to pick a tracking point over here I'll get a few frames out of it before the tree will cover this one up but the zoom in here, so the last Keyframe of Tracker 1 is going to Correspond to the first keyframe of tracker 2 I'm going to overlap by [1] frame So let's just step through this Okay, so that's about as far as [I] can go Before [this] tracking point is going to go behind the tree and my original tracking [point] [is] still not visible so I'm just going to create another tracker tracker three again position only and This time I'm going to put it over on This side maybe I'll just do the top of this pillar here oops, and analyze Forward a few frames again We have one frame of overlap here that tracker to the last frame of [tracker] [2] is the same as the first frame [of] tracker [3] And that's convenient. I picked a good [spot]. Huh, there's a leaf covering it in the second frame [okay], now I can see my original point again, so I don't want to continue on track point one I'm going to create another track point and just be a tracker for again position only Put it up here and again overlap by one frame oops Okay So now I have all my tracking points set up so if I go select tracker one so current track is tracker one and I Had this set to transform. Maybe I accidentally hit track motion instead of stabilized motion. I meant to hit stabilize motion but no problem I just hit stabilize here And then hit apply and I'm going to go to [x] [&] [y] [direction] so x is horizontal y is the vertical direction So I want to apply to both then I can go to tracker, two. I have to set the motion source here tracker to apply Tracker to and I'll apply tracker three and apply Tracker four Okay, let me down rise this a bit. Let's do a ram preview. See how that looks So it's still pretty shaky But the important point to look at is this peak right here stays pretty much exactly in place And I have not corrected the rotation yet. So what we have here [is] rotation wobbles mostly So you can see there's a few spaces Let me try to go back and find them There's a few spots where this thing doesn't look like it's very precise like right there this frame right here Seems to be a little bit off so what I can do is go back to tracker [four] let's look at tracker four let me set my Resolution to full so we can see clearly And I can zoom in closely. I can see that this point is a little [bit] off So let me just move it back into place That's no problem, and then I can just apply tracker four again, and then that should have smooth that out Okay, so if I put my cursor there near the peak you can see it's it's pretty good, okay so that's a pretty good first step but Obviously, we have the rotation to fix okay, [so] one thing I want to check out before I go Before I move on to the next step is this is going just a little bit outside the frame a mistake I made on my last tutorial is I forgot to Change the size of the composition so that to make sure [that] this image isn't getting cropped It's getting cropped only a tiny bit here, but I'll just kind of Increase the size a little bit and just try to make [sure] That the image isn't getting cropped here It's still getting cropped a little bit. Let me make the height a little bit bigger And just trying to keep this thing within the frame Okay, so it can be extra large the composition can be extra large that doesn't matter as long as it's not cropping our image Okay, so the next step is I want [to] go back to our project and this is our composition I want to drag the composition down to the new composition button So now [we] have another new composition, and we don't have any of our tracking points or any of our transform information in here So we can start fresh With the position already stabilized So in this case now all I have to do is stabilize the rotation and not the position, so I'm going to hit stabilize motion I'm going to select rotation and I'm going to uncheck the position and make sure my Quality is full so I can see what I'm doing here now in this case. I want to choose a pair of tracking points that are on a Ideally a vertical line so we have a lot of good candidates here these vertical pillars here or if it's a horizontal line It should be near [the] height of the camera If it's not vertical and it's not horizontal near the height of the camera as I pan [around] the angle of these things will change and then you'll end up with a if [you're] tracking a line that wasn't horizontal You'd end up with an image that it just rotated further and further and it end up all crooked at the end Which is fixable I'm going to show you how to fix that later if you have to do that as a last resort But we're going to try to avoid that by picking some vertical lines So let me go back to my tracker Okay so Track Point [1] and Track Point 2 Let me pick the left side of this pillar seems like a nice good spot to pick a nice vertical Line and the Points that you pick don't have to be exactly the [same] from frame to frame So I could move this box up and down anywhere on this pillar as long as it stays on this Pillar on the Edge of this pillar as long as the angle is consistent from Frame to frame You want to try and pick parts of there as far away as you [can] get them Because if you are off by a couple of pixels or something if the points are very close together [a] couple of pixels can make a big difference in the angle and it can make your rotation tracking less Less consistent and less smooth if the points are far apart Being off by one or two pixels isn't going to be a such a big deal So I've picked a couple of points [here's] a tip you can do click on this little arrow here and go to New layer viewer and if I want to check two points at the same time and zoom way in so that I can see just how accurate the tracking is I can do that, and I can control the zoom of the two views independently as well so I'm just going to start tracking forward and Picking points here one of the things unfortunately if you have two windows open only the active one Updates if you hit the analyze forward button, so you have to see now this one I think is it's either off or it's gone behind the trees So I have to have to stop it every once in a while And just kind of check the other point if I'm hitting the analyze forward button and just make sure [that] both of these points are accurate Now if [made] the bounding box is very wide because I don't want the points moving too far up or down the pillar [I] want them mostly to just They tend to drift up and down the pillars [and] I [don't] want them drifting too close together, [so] I'm mostly just [I'm] concerned about being somewhere on the pillar and don't drift too far up or down Now at this point my bottom Point is blocked My bottom tracking point is blocked behind this thing oops. Undo that [it's] fine. I can just move it up the pillar I Still have a pretty sizable vertical line here to work with and I'm going to move it back down as soon as I get past that obstruction just so that I have the longest line I can for more accuracy in the rotation stabilization So here you can really see the advantages of doing Rotation only when obstructions get in the way I simply move the points to a different point on this pillar, and it's still going to work for me Okay, so here's a case [where]? The entire side of this pillar has been obstructed so what I'm going to do is since I'm doing rotation stabilization only I can simply pick another pillar and because of the oops because of the thing I mentioned earlier about the Lens producing Warping especially toward the edges. I'm going to try to stay toward the middle and pick [another] pillar. That's nearby and Know that the this lamppost in the foreground is obstructing this pillar. I'll just move [back] to my original pillar Okay, so now I've reached a point where the tree is [going] to be blocking this tracking point the set of tracking points but just like before all I have to do is scoot these over to a different pillar and continue tracking So again now the pillar the [tree] is blocking that pillar so I'm going to move this over to another pillar Okay, that's all the tracking points are in place now oops Didn't mean it like [that] okay. So now I only have one tracker. I'm going to apply it, okay So what's going to happen here? Is this is not this is not going to work? but I wanted to show you what happens if you simply do a Rotation you know position tracking first and then rotation tracking let me just do the first Show the first second now it looks not too bad, but if you notice this point that we had nice and stable before is Kind of wobbling around now what happened? It was it was perfectly stable, so I'll show you what happened here when you rotate okay, so this point here that Thing is your anchor [point], so [when] you rotate this image. Let me just take this rotation thing it rotates around that point so in each case We're adjusting the rotation, but we don't want it to rotate around this point We want to rotate around the tracking point where that we picked before? So let me go back to the first frame [and] if I press y or you can just select this pan behind tool here and pick your anchor point And I want to move it. [so] [we're] going to go it can be tricky to see sometimes. I want to move it up to Our tracking point that we picked before Let me get rid of all this rotation data And I can pick a more clear frame Okay, so that's about where we need it to be and I just hit V to go back to the selection tool Okay, so now that's my tracking point now. I want to apply again my stabilization my rotation stabilization and send this back to quarter and Let's take a look at how it looks now Hey, it's looking much better so if I put my cursor near the peak there It is staying pretty steady except for a couple [of] places where I probably had a bad tracking points That I can still go back and adjust, but I don't think that will necessarily be Required at this point because the next step I'm going to try to do is since we have this pretty well stabilized now Might be able to get rid of these last little bit of jitters By running it through warp stabiliser like I like to try that again once once I get it pretty stable because it's a lot easier for Warp Stabiliser to take care of an image like this then the original one I had which was jumping all over the place, so [let] me just um first I want to drop this into another new composition and Then on that composition. I'm going to run warp Stabiliser, and we'll see what it does So warp stabiliser produced a pretty nice result it looks pretty good and smooth The only thing I can see is there's a little bit of Kind of it looks like there's a kind of a smooth zoom out and back in [just] after it passes the tree I want [to] see if I can get rid of the auto scale just stabilize let me just do [stabilize] only see what that looks like ah Well it still seems to have that little bit of wobble just after it passes the tree it's not too bad you could try to fix that by Just doing a scale only just do a manual tracking just do uh Like I would drop this into another sub composition and only do a tracking point from maybe you know right around here Maybe try to pick a couple of points on a pillar and just do a stabilized motion and just do scale only Because everything else is pretty smooth Go back and change this to full And I would just pick a point at the top [of] the pillar [and] point at the bottom of the pillar See if we can smooth this out okay, I think that's probably far enough and just apply that and I'm just going [to] shrink this down to the region or interest it in and Do a quick preview in there and see how that looks No, that's got a subtle little Subtle little shaking going on still, but that's not too bad You could probably mess around with some tracking points and try to clean that up a little bit more But it's pretty good for our purposes here okay, so now the only thing left to do is because I had these black borders in my composition to begin with [Warp] Stabiliser couldn't Crop them out because it didn't really know where the end of my image was so I kind of need to manually crop that out I'm going to go to composition settings. I want to change my resolution anyway [cuz] I want to deliver 1920 by 1080 full 1080p resolution So obviously this is way too big [I] can scale this down you hold down control and move the scale it Moves slower if you hold down shift it moves faster. So that's just a kind of a general tip for any kind of Sliders, you're moving in after-effects Change this up to full So maybe just a little bigger oops Well what I forgot to do here is I forgot that this was already scaled. So what I could do [I] already have a bunch of tracking points for scale so what I can do here is I could create a sub composition for this or I'll show you another trick if you don't already know about no objects you can just go to layer new no, object, and then take this little guy this pick whip I think if that's not visible, you might have the expander [collapsed] the layer switch pane with that button and then just take the pick whip for my from my composition here and Pick it to the null object so at this point I can adjust the scale of the no object and it will adjust the scale of my composition along with it and that allows [me] to do an independent adjustment of the scale without messing up these other scales that are already in there, so [I] also, take a look at how this is looking, so [that's] looking pretty good. I would like to adjust this down a little bit I think I feel like it's pointing a little too high I can just adjust my my null object and It'll also likewise Adjust my background layer [so] there we go. I think this is pretty much done okay, so I'm also going to show you another technique that So in the in the first technique I did position tracking first and then rotation separately But I'm going to show you another technique where you can do position and rotation tracking together and do multiple Trackers to get around this tree okay, so let me just start by Taking my original images and dropping it into a new composition, and I'm going to rename [this] as technique Tube All right, so in this case. I'm going to do stabilize motion and I'm going to select position and rotation So I Want to choose a couple of points that are ideally on a vertical surface or a vertical line so again We have the columns that are a pretty good choice So in this case position or tracking point one is Critical that it be it's in the same spot in each frame I cannot float up and down the pillar like we did before because position point or tracking point one is used for not just for rotation but also that's your your position tracking point tracking point [two] is used only for the rotation so it can float up and down on the pillar as Long as it doesn't go left or right? That's fine tracking point one is the more important one, so I'm just going [to] analyze forward [ok] so now I've reached a point where tracking point one is about to go behind a tree, so what I'm going to do is just hit stabilize motion again, and it's going to bring up a new tracker now its tracker two and I want The first frame of tracker [two] to Correspond to the last frame [of] tracker one so they should overlap by one frame So I'm going to check position and rotation again, and this time. I'm [just] going to choose a different pillar Let's move over a few pillars oops Just choose a point there it's So now I've reached the point where this tracker is about to go [where] this tracking point is about to go behind this tree in The next frame it's totally behind the tree so Now I need to choose another tracking point or another motion tracker someone [hit] stabilize motion again choose position and rotation and I'm going to overlap them by one frame again and choose a new tracking point So I'm just going to move over here and choose a different pillar you Okay, I think that's far enough so now I'm going to go and apply Tracker 1 and just hit apply to [x] [&] [y] direction okay, and Now this first section should be smooth out Let me select it Do quarter resolution let me just take a look at how that looks So that's pretty well smooth out. So now I'm going to going to Apply Tracker - oops track to apply okay, and Now the second section should be smoothed out, but I'm going to show you what happens here I'm gonna do a [ram] preview of that Okay, so what happened here in each frame during tracker 1 the image moves further and further to [the] right And then it jumps back into place So what happens here is when you apply position and rotation stabilization it creates three sets of Keyframes for Anchor point position and rotation now position it only gives you one Keyframe and then That keyframe is supposed to be the same in each frame of this Tracker then when you apply Tracker 2 it gives you a new position Keyframe But it's not in the same place as the first one so what happens when you have To position keyframes that are not in the same place, and they're separated by some space in the timeline is [after] [effects] automatically creates a smooth pan from one to the other and So we don't want it to do that we don't want the movie want the position to be the same through all of these frames So I'm going to Copy select this position Keyframe, so it's yellow ctRl C to copy it and then bring it to the end just before the next position Keyframe and CtRl V to paste it there, so now let me do a [ram] preview Now we've gotten rid of that drifting problem So now I'm going to apply Stabilizer 3 or Tracker 3 Apply that x&Y, okay? and It's going to be the same problem again. Let me do a ram preview to show you what it looks like So now during tracker 2 it Moves to the right or [to] the left I mean in every frame until you get to tracker 3 and then it jumps back into place, and then it's okay after that so again, we're going to do the same thing Copy the position Keyframe and Paste it [here] One frame before the next position Keyframe that was set up by tracker 3 so let me do a [ram] preview of this [ok] there you have it Get past that tree nice and smooth now So you still have the option of taking this one and dropping it into a new composition and then running warp Stabiliser on the output there oops New composition and then run warp stabiliser on that one to smooth it out a little further Ok one more thing I wanted to discuss and that is if you cannot find Two points on a vertical surface, and you just can't find anything that's suitable, and you need to pick another straight line or another Couple of points [to] do motion tracking on to stabilize your rotation you'll end up with your image getting crooked a lot of times and I'll show you how to fix that so I'll just go and do stabilized motion and I'll do a position and rotation I'll go in and put some points in here to stabilize position and rotation and I'll show you what happens and how to fix it I'm going to choose two points on the edge of this roof which is Obviously, not a vertical image or a vertical line, and it's not a horizontal line That's anywhere near the height of the camera, so this [thing's] going to get crooked in short order okay, so got a bunch of Tracking points on here, and I'm just going to apply [this] to [x] [&] [y] [direction], and we'll see what it looks [like] So as you can see the further along you go. It's pretty well stabilized, but the further along you go By the time you get to the end this image is pretty crooked it's obviously nowhere near straight, but if I try to just take the rotation and And fix it well that doesn't work [because] I have all these other rotation points already set So there's no good way for me to to just move those directly so what I'm going to do is go layer new null object and take the pick whip here and parent it to Parent my composition to the null object or I could just pick it from this drop-down list and again if you don't see [that] you might have to push this button to Bring up some additional. Oh, well one of these buttons here brings up additional settings here Okay, so the null object I can just take this null object and to animate the rotation keyframes just check I push the stopwatch button and By the time we get to the end I can hold down control so I can do fine Rotation Correction here rotate it back correctly and then as you get to [a] certain point I'm going to hit ctrl R to bring up the ruler and I want to make [sure] this is vertical, so along the way I might have to fix the rotation and a couple of points and just try to make [sure] that stays pretty close to vertical I want to just a little bit that way So as this moves along just kind of make [sure] that stays vertical Okay, that looks pretty close enough up now if I do a ram preview So now it's pretty stable, and I've fixed the tilting problem. We had I'm not going to do the whole composition, but you get the idea of how it works So in some cases depending on how far you're pivoting around your subject the rotation can be quite extreme and you might have to do quite a bit of Rotation back with the null object to get it straight again Okay, so that's about it Those are my tips for some more advanced Stabilization techniques when warp stabilizer doesn't work when you don't have easy convenient points that you can pick in every single frame when you have to do it a little bit more piecemeal and come up with some other techniques to get it to work, so I hope this has been helpful and thanks for watching
