Get the Best Video Stabilization in DaVinci Resolve

[Music] probably hey what's the crack and welcome to or back to the channel today's episode's aim is to show you the workflow that I take When approaching stabilization in DaVinci Resolve in order to get the best results possible now if you're familiar with what stabilization is and how it works feel free to use the timestamps to jump ahead to the appropriate sections but first what is stabilization well stabilization is a post-production method that we use to either reduce or entirely remove camera shake from our footage an oversimplified way of explaining how it works is the software will analyze the footage and if it detects that the camera shook left by 10 pixels it will digitally move the image right by 10 pixels and the result is footage that looks like it hasn't moved at all when performing stabilization there's a few things that you always have to keep in mind the first is what are you actually trying to do with the footage is the shot a already stable enough gimbal shot with some micro Jitters that you're trying to remove entirely or is it a aggressive handheld shot that you're just trying to take the edge off of secondly is that stabilization must always be treated with a shot by shot approach the other thing you'll always want to keep in mind is that stabilization is a constant Balancing Act between increasing stability and not introducing unwanted artifacts there are three unwanted artifacts that come to mind when we talk about stabilization the first is the jello artifact which is where the movement that has been added digitally to counteract the actual movement makes the shot look as though it's got a bit of like a Jello warping to it the second artifact is one that I kind of jokely refer to as Phantom motion blur when you think about it if a camera is moved aggressively enough that motion blur gets baked into that footage we accept the motion blur with the movement however if we've gone and stabilized that footage and there's no longer the movement now the motion blur not only seems totally unnatural but it's also a dead giveaway that the footage has been stabilized in post production and lastly the more we stabilize the footage the more the footage has had to be wiggled around the screen to counteract that movement and the image can run out of pixels on the edge of the screen to accommodate that movement which means you will get these random black edges wiggling in on the peripherals of the image which means we're going to have to crop in on the image to counteract that so it's a good thing to keep in mind when shooting if you think you're going to need stabilization in post it might be no harm shooting slightly wider than you intend knowing you'll have to crop in a bit in post-production so that information I think was pretty important important to cover because they go a long way towards informing your decisions when tweaking parameters so now let's actually jump into the software and look at the approach that I take when going about stabilizing my footage in DaVinci Resolve today this is our primary sample footage we're going to be taking a look at and it's just a simple tracking shot that is handheld of this gentleman walking into the gym today we're going to be working within the color page of DaVinci Resolve because originally that's where all of these settings were found but it is worth noting that these days these can be found in both the edit and the cut page so on the color page you will want to come to the middle set of panel options and click on the fifth icon for the tracker panel and within the tracking panel you have three options the tracking for window the tracking for the stabilizer and the tracking for effects we want the tracking for the stabilizer so before we dive in and start tweaking parameters we need to first come down to the bottom right of this panel and open up this drop down menu and take a look at the options here these are the different methods in which resolve will go about analyzing your footage for movement and applying stabilization here you will have up to four options three of which we can see and there is one additional one called gyro which we can't currently see so let's start with gyro that will only be available if you are trying to stabilize a clip that was shot on a Blackmagic design camera that has a gyroscope built in and that camera must be on a up-to-date enough version of firmware that ensures that that gyroscopic data has been written to the b-raw file as metadata that resolve can analyze and use to stabilize if you have access to gyro I would recommend that you start there however it might not always give the results you want so you still will want to try some of the other techniques that that we're about to discuss starting with perspective perspective will analyze the footage for pan tilt zoom and rotation and apply a certain style of stabilization based on that movement next we have similarity and this will also analyze for panning tilting zoom and rotation but is for instances where perspective is giving undesirable artifacts in the shot and lastly we have translation which will only analyze for panning and tilting and perform stabilization based on that you would think that because we can look at a shot and say there's only certain types of movement within this shot that you will want to go to the appropriate style of analysis and stabilization but in my experience I can regularly be very counter-intuitive results off of these options so for that reason this is the workflow that I always use starting with the perspective option I will come to this smooth setting and I'll Crank It Up to its highest value of one and then I'll hit stabilize allowing resolve to analyze the clip and perform stabilization then I will play through the clip and analyze the results for myself now as you can see this is a really bad example of good stabilization and it has those two key artifacts that I mentioned at the start of this video in ample amounts one being that awful Jello effect and the other being that Phantom motion blur now let's repeat that with the similarity option and assess its results similarity is definitely doing a better job on this clip than perspective when it comes to how much artifacts it introduces into the shot and lastly we will repeat this with the translation option and assess its results so here we can see that we get even less artifacts being introduced but at the cost of not that much stabilization unless one of these three options is giving me really close to my desired results right out of the gate what I will typically do is go with the option that seems like a good middle of the road so in this case similarity and the reason for this is if I go with the most aggressive option I may not be able to dial back my parameters enough to find that elusive sweet spot and if I go for the least aggressive options I may not be able to turn up my parameters enough to find that sweet spot so the most likely one of these that would give me a sweet spot upon tweaking my parameters is the middle of the road option before we jump into the parameters let's take a quick look at this zoom button by default this will be toggled on but if I toggle It Off and play through the clip you can see that we end up with these black pixels creeping in on the edge of the image and that is because as resolve stabilizes the footage and moves it around to counteract the movement within the footage it runs out of pixels very quickly this button will Zoom the image in or crop the image in by just the right amount to avoid any black pixels from appearing in your footage the two most important parameters you can now start tweaking to find your sweet spot and we're going to look at them together are smooth and strength now if you read the Manual's definition of these two parameters in my opinion they do not tell you a whole lot of information about the differences between them in fact if you read manual they basically sound like they do the same thing but they just word them differently so instead let me show you the difference first if I come to smooth and turn it as low as it goes to 0.25 and leave strength on one and we will stabilize with those parameters and assess the results what I typically see when I do this is we don't get a whole lot of additional stabilization to the shot but we still get quite a bit of artifacting going on now let's flip these settings around we'll keep smooth on the full value of 1 and will turn strength down to 0.25 when we do this we tend to get footage that doesn't have a whole lot of additional stabilization but on the plus side doesn't have a whole lot of artifacting because strength is the overall application of how smooth we've decided to go now when it comes to what figures should you pump into these two parameters there's no hard and fast easy answer to that because you have to take everything on a shot to shot basis what I would say though is first of all you have to determine how smooth are you trying to go with your shot is it a gimbal shot with a tiny bit of gesture in it that you're trying to smooth out entirely or is it a handheld shot where you're trying to just take the aggressive edge off of the camera Shake rather than eradicate the camera Shake altogether like we are in this shot and then the second thing is that balance the introduction of artifacts for the Improvement to stabilization those are the two things you need to think about when tweaking these settings now in this example what I find when trying to take the edge off of a handheld Shake is to go for the middle of the road settings of 0.5 and 0.5 because it tends to give you very organic results with minimal artifacting and non-excessive stabilization really just taking the edge off here now let's look at this last parameter cropping ratio but first i'm going to jack up smooth and strength up to 100 just to really exaggerate the result here for you this is a ratio between how smooth your footage can be at the cost of how far resolve is willing to crop in on the footage to make sure that you do not get those black pixels creeping in on the edge that I showed earlier I will rarely tweak this setting and there is two reasons for that one is that 0.5 the middle of the road setting is a very very well-rounded setting that you rarely need to deviate from and the second is unless the amount of cropping that a given amount of stabilization that you have landed on is exceeding a certain threshold you won't even see any different end results in a lot of the settings for the cropping ratio and this shot is a perfect example of this so let me show you what I mean if we try turn this all the way down to 0.25 and hit stabilize we see no difference let me bring that up to 0.5 still no difference let's bring it up to 0.75 still we have no difference point eight no difference again 0.85 and now we finally kick in to the cropping ratios effective range in this instance so you can often waste a lot of time here for very little gain of stabilization versus cropping ratio the only time I really will ever go here is if by cropping in on the image we're losing something at the edge of the image that we really need in the frame then I will take the time to go there but other than that 0.5 is a very good middle of the road setting for nearly all footage next I wanted to quickly show you how the perspective option isn't the total dot of an option that it may have appeared in the previous shot in my experiences one of the key distinguishing factors that will determine how good results with the perspective option are do you have two types of movement in your shot or a knot in the first option we have the movement of the camera moving through space but we also have the movement of a subject within the frame creating a lot of movement that the software had to analyze and in those cases I find perspective doesn't do a very good job however in a shot like this where the only movement in the frame that we have to worry about is really the movement of the camera itself perspective often gets very good results now I'm not going to go through the time to tweak the settings and waste your time here I just wanted to show you how it doesn't give terrible results off the bat like we saw in the first example and this speaks to that key Point again of you have to take stabilization with a shot by shot approach and finally let's look at this last option that we haven't talked about yet the camera lock option I'm going to cut straight to the point on this one I think the only time you should use this is when you're trying to stabilize a shot that was shot handheld but you want to look like it was locked off on a tripod so here I have a clip that I held pretty still didn't try to pan or tilt or move the camera in any way I just wanted it as still as possible and I'll use the camera lock option to stabilize this you won't be able to tweak cropping ratios smooth or strength anymore but you will still be able to choose between perspective similarity translation and if it's available gyro and you still will want to play around with those options to get the best results as always I hope that you found that tutorial helpful and if you did please consider giving the video a thumbs up as well as subscribing to the channel and hitting the notification Bell so you can see more content just like this have a good one and I'll see you in the next video [Music] side

Channel: Film Resolved

Views: 59,274

Keywords: Film Resolved, Leigh Dalton, Videographer, Videography, DaVinci Resolve, NLE, Non Liniear Editor, Edit, Editing, Editor, Color, Color Grade, Color Grading, Colour, Colour Grade, Colour Grading, Video, YouTube, Tutorial, Education, Learn, How To, stabilize, stabilizer, stabilization, perspective, similarity, translation, cropping ratio, camera lock, zoom, smooth, strength, tracker, video stabilization

Id: czE7sb6txBQ

Length: 15min 27sec (927 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 22 2022