How to Stabilize Footage Like a PRO with Davinci Resolve

I'm going to teach you how to take your raw shaky camera footage and transform it into smooth and stable video that your audience will fall in love with and we're going to do it all using the free editing software DaVinci Resolve 18. let's get started start up a new project in DaVinci Resolve I'm going to call mine stabilize this right click in the media pool and select import media from here select your footage and click open next switch over to the edit tab and then drag your footage into the timeline let's review some of this shaky footage this footage is rough it was recorded using the time lapse feature with a mobile phone while walking on a bridge the result is that the image jumps around a lot making the viewer feel like they're on a bumpy ride let's fix this using DaVinci resolve's built-in stabilization feature over in the media inspector scroll down until you see stabilization click on the stabilization section and it will expand to show you all of the stabilization controls first is the stabilization mode there are three options here perspective similarity and translation each one uses a slightly different algorithm to try and stabilize your footage different modes will have varying levels of success for your footage next is the camera lock toggle camera lock is a tripod stabilization mode when you check this it will try to eliminate all of the movement in the footage it will also remove all the other options in the stabilization view depending on your footage this can be an easy way to achieve high quality results stabilizing algorithms are going to distort the image of each frame to try and create a stable view into the world you've captured this Distortion often leaves black edges around your frame in order to avoid this you'll want to make sure you have the zoom toggle checked the zoom toggle will push into the image to try and remove all the black bars on the edge that may appear when the footage is stabilized Junction is more of an art than a science because we're relying on algorithms to produce results most of stabilization is guess and check work however once you know what kind of shot you're looking for you can reduce the number of options you need to toggle which can speed up your workflow significantly for example with this shot I want to reduce any extraneous movements and mimic a dolly shot for this reason I can check the camera lock toggle additionally since I don't want any black bars in my finished project I'll leave the zoom toggle checked with camera lock Zoom cropping smooth and strength all locked in we can now cycle through the three modes and see which one works best for our footage let's start with perspective and click stabilize the algorithm will process the footage and then we can view the results in the timeline okay this is better but not quite what I'm looking for let's switch the mode to similarity and see how that looks click stabilize to see the results okay this is better but I'm still not convinced this is the best one let's see if we can get any better luck with translation click stabilize to view this mode okay now this is looking much better the camera movement is smooth and I'm seeing a huge Improvement overall let's compare this again to our raw footage to see how big of an improvement we achieved that's the basics of stabilization lock in the features that work for your clip then guess and check until you have the best results for your needs let me know in the comments which DaVinci Resolve tutorial you want to see next

Channel: Timothy Vallier

Views: 218,652

Keywords: davinci resolve, davinci resolve 18, how to fix unstable footage, how to fix unstable video, how to fix shaky footage, how to stabilize footage in davinci resolve 18, video editing, warp stabilizer

Id: X1WG5jc5SU0

Length: 4min 12sec (252 seconds)

Published: Sun Sep 25 2022