From the course: After Effects: Ten Ways to Improve Your Online Video

Removing unwanted movement - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects: Ten Ways to Improve Your Online Video

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Removing unwanted movement

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- [Instructor] We are starting our journey with this shaky camera clip of an athlete putting wrist straps on his hand. I also have a title that describes this situation quite accurately and my job as an After Effects artist is to stabilize this video, so it'll be easier to look at. So I'll post a preview and then I'll select the clip. I'll go to the animation menu and I'll choose Warp Stabilizer VFX, which will apply the Warp stabilizer effect. And this is a two step process. The first one will analyze the clip in the background, and the second step, as you will see in a moment with this orange bar, is going to take care of the stabilization. And now I can press space bar to preview the shot and to see the result. And as we can see, it is stabilized, but it's also warped some areas due to the fact that by default the method that this effect is using is Subspace Warp, which can create this weird artifact as you can see over here on the windows. So I'll change the method to position, scale and rotation, and I want to show you what happens behind the scenes. So I'll switch this framing to stabilize only. And as we can see, this effect moves the frame to create a stabilized version. So I'll switch it back to stabilized Crop and Autoscale, which is going to obviously upscale the footage in this case by 110. And if we want to preserve some of the scale, we have this option. And this is going to try and minimize the scaling. And we can also introduce additional smoothness. So let's try 100%. And by the way, you can take this value above 100 and to restore some of the details because as a result of auto scaling, we are losing some of the sharpness. I'll post a playback, I'll select the clip, and then I'll go under effect, Blur and Sharpen, and I'll apply the Unsharp mask effect, which will apply in High Pass filter and help us to restore some of the detail. So I'll set the amount here to 100, and if you want, you can also play with the radius, just don't take it too far. With high values for the radius, we are going to see some halos on the edges. So I leave it at one and I'll press space bar again so we can get a sense of the result. Now if you want, we can remove the entire motion of this handheld shot by setting the result here from Smooth Motion to no motion. And this will eliminate the entire camera handheld motion and give us a steady shot as if this video was taken with a tripod. I can maximize the screen by pressing on the tilde key so we can have a closer look at it. And this is how you stabilize the shot inside After Effects, quite straightforward and easy to pull off. However, under the advanced options, there are few special features that can help you to get more out of this effect, and we are going to take a look at them in the next video.

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