Original subtitles

So in my timeline here, I have two different clips.

I have this first clip of me on a slack line.

It's a bit of a shaky shot.

And then I also have this time lapse of a mountain over here.

Both of these are examples of clips that I would want to stabilize.

So the first thing you want to do in the edit tab is

you want to hit shift tab to reveal your inspector.

Or you can just press the inspector over here by enabling it.

And under video, we're going to on to navigate to stabilization.

Now, by default, this is going to be turned off.

You have to manually enable it and select stabilize in order

to actually stabilize anything.

So we're going to enable it over here.

And honestly, 100% of the time, does it matter what I'm stabilizing?

I'm always going to start off in the mode perspective.

This is the one that works most of the time,

and most of the time just does the best job.

This is the one that I always start off with.

So I just make sure that this dropdown right here is set to perspective.

Underneath this dropdown we have the camera lock option

and that allows us to basically remove all motion from our video

so that the camera looks like it's locked on a tripod.

Now this setting works well,

but it only works well in specific situations

and we're going be learning more about that in this lesson.

Now, this zoom box over here basically just allows us to tell the program

whether or not it has permission to zoom in on our image or not.

When these programs stabilize our video, they are physically moving the video,

they're rotating it, scaling it and changing the position

in order to compensate for the original camera movement.

Now, if we leave Zoom unchecked, then we're basically telling the program

that we're not giving a permission to zoom in on our image.

So we'll probably see black borders, we'll see the tops and the edges

of our image moving left and right, rotating around and changing in position.

And most of the time you're not going to want that.

So you're just going to want to leave. Zoom checked.

And under that, we have a couple more settings that we can change here.

The first one is cropping ratio.

So the thing you need to understand about stabilizing

your footage is that the program is going to crop in on your image.

It needs to crop in in order to create artificial camera movement

that compensates for the original camera movement.

So it needs to crop in a little bit in order to do that.

Essentially, this cropping ratio value just limits how hard the stabilizer

tries to stabilize.

And the thing we need to understand about this is the higher the number,

the less it's going to stabilize.

So if we have cropping ratio set to one, it's not going to stabilize anything.

We're not going to see any difference.

The lower this number, the more we are allowing the program

to stabilize our footage.

So with the cropping ratio value, we are basically telling DaVinci

how much we are allowing it to crop in on our image.

So basically the lower

the number in theory, the better the stabilization should be, the higher

the number here, the closer we will be to the original footage.

So this next value over here allows us to apply

mathematical smoothing to the analyze data used to stabilize the clip.

Basically, what this means is DaVinci had to create a virtual camera

that kind of does the opposite movement of the original movement

in order to compensate for those original movements.

And basically what we are doing here is applying mathematical smoothing

to that analyze data.

Basically that virtual camera

that DaVinci made to compensate for the original movement.

We are applying smoothing to that data over there, but to keep things

plain and simple, basically the higher

the number here, the smoother the shot is going to be.

The lower the number,

the more of the natural camera motion you're going to have in the shot.

Now, this last strength value over here is something that I don't really touch.

But basically what this does is it allows you to choose

how much of the original camera motion you want to show through.

So it's basically like a blend slider that allows you to choose how much of the

stabilization track you want to use versus the original camera movement.

Now, the thing to understand here is that when this is out,

when you're using the full stabilization track, once you start to go below one,

then you use less and less of the stabilization track

and more and more of the original camera motion up until you hit

zero zero is going to be no stabilization.

So when you're at zero here, you can enter it manually as well.

This is basically the original footage.

Once you start going below zero

than the actual original camera movements are intensified.

So this is a slider I never really touch.

I always just leave it at one. You can reset it right here.

And it's not something that I've really had to use yet.

Now, the thing about changing any of these

parameters over here is you need to click stabilize after you've made any changes.

So if I've already stabilized my clip and I make a change to the cropping ratio,

it's not going to change anything in the clip.

I'm going to have to click stabilize again in order to actually process

those changes.

Same thing goes for Zoom. Same thing goes for camera.

Lock All of these different parameters down here.

If we make any changes, click stabilize.

After you've made those changes.

Now, before I click stabilize, let's quickly watch this original video.

Now, it might not look too shaky,

but there is actually quite a bit of movement here.

If we zoom in on the mountains in the background over here,

which is a zoom in on those and just take a look,

we can see how they're shaking pretty abruptly.

That does not look like smooth movement.

You can tell that this is handheld.

They're kind of moving back and forth and that simply just doesn't look good.

So I'm going to command Z, bring that back to its original size

so we can see that this shot is pretty shaky.

Let's click stabilize and see what happens.

And the awesome thing about the stabilization

intervention is it's really fast.

So now that we've stabilized the clip, let's zoom in over here to the mountains

and we can

see they're a lot less jittery before there is a lot more jitter.

Things have definitely smoothed out.

Now, let's play around this even more, the cropping ratio.

Let's bring that down.

Let's bring the smoothness up a bit and let's click stabilize again.

Now, let's take a look, see if this looks any better.

Looks pretty good.

Why don't we bring this smoothness up even more?

Those mountains are looking pretty smooth.

I'm liking them

much smoother.

Now, let's take a look at what this would look like

if we change the cropping ratio to one.

Let's click stabilize.

And we can see, just like how I had said before,

if we use the cropping ratio to one, then it basically does nothing.

This is our original footage.

We are basically telling the program to not do any cropping

and therefore without any cropping it's not able to actually stabilize.

So as I said before, literally 100% of the time I'm always using perspective.

First, Da Vinci does have explanations as to how similarity and translation work,

but in all honesty, I just haven't been able to find success

in selecting the right one for this certain situation.

For me, a lot of the time it's really just a guessing game.

But perspective works for most situations.

And if I'm not having any luck with that, which is honestly pretty rare,

then I'll jump over to similarity or translation

and play around with those to see which one works best.

So just for fun, I want to show you guys

what this clip would look like if I selected the camera lock option.

So let's click stabilize and see what happens.

Now you can see we've punched in a ton on our image.

We are like probably zoomed in like, I don't know, a thousand or 2,000%.

And basically the reason that is, is because we are telling the program

that we want this shot to look as though it is locked off in order for this shot

to actually look like it's on a tripod and it's locked off.

You need to be filming the same thing, right?

You need to be filming in the same direction.

If you're shooting a landscape and you do a 180 turn,

it's literally impossible to make that look as though it's a static shot right.

So that's basically what's happening here.

If I reset this stabilization, we can scrub through this clip

and we can see that the camera angle changes substantially and really

the only constant within this entire shot is this area right here in this tree.

And that's basically what the program did, is it zoomed in on that tree

and tried to do its best to make this look like a locked off shot.

So that brings me to the next clip over here, which is a time lapse

which was shot on a moving camera.

And this is a perfect example of when I would

want to use this camera lock feature.

So this was taken on a camera that was moving.

It was not stills.

So basically, if we zoom in on this mountain over here

and we press play, we can see this mountain moving all over the place.

So basically what I would want to do in this situation

is to tell the program that I basically want this to look like a stationary shot.

I want it to look like the camera was locked off.

So all I got to do is hit back camera lock button over here,

and we can see that we no longer have any of these options down here.

Those disappear once we enable that.

So with camera lock selected, let's press, stabilize and see what we got.

We can see that we've punched in on our image a little bit.

Now, let's zoom in on to this mountain and take a look.

Much more stable.

We can see that it is kind of warping a little bit,

and that's because that's what the program is actually doing.

It's literally warping the image

in order for it to feel like it's staying in the same place.

Now, when we playback this video fast by scrub through it like this, we can see

that warping a bit more clearer, but we are not playing it that fast

and making those slight warps throughout time in real time.

To the naked eye, you can't really tell.

So it works. It does a great job in this shot.

Looks like it's static.

Now the cool thing about stabilization

within the cut tab and edit tab is that they are the exact same.

So if we open up the inspector over here, we have a clip selected in our timeline.

We have that exact same stabilization feature right here,

and it works exactly the same.

So it doesn't matter what page you're on,

the cut page or the edit page, the stabilization feature is exactly the same.

So that's it for this video I hope you guys enjoyed.

I hope you learn something new and I'll catch you in the next one.