Warp Stabilizer - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] A handheld camera often records video with an undesirable shake. The best way to shoot stable footage is by using a tripod or a camera gimbal. But if you don't have one, one way to fix it in post is to use warp stabilization in after effects. This effect helps to remove camera shake and can be used to insert layers into shaky footage as we'll see here. In the second composition, I've got some footage of a shaky handheld camera looking over the city. One thing to note about warp stabilizer is that the severity of the camera shake will dictate how much can be smoothed. It's not a magic bullet for all shots but it's a great for smoothing out small jitters in handheld footage such as this. First of all, let's select our footage and we'll come up here to effect and under distort, you can find here at the bottom Warp Stabilizer. You can also right click on your layer and under track and stabilize, Warp Stabilizer VFX is here as well. I'll twirl down my effects and double click on Warp Stabilizer to open it up in the effect controls. And here you can see in the background what it's doing and its progress. We can still continue to work inside of After Effects. Here I'm altering the brightness with the Levels effect. All right, now that it's done let's rewind to the beginning and play this back. And you can see that we're getting much smoother results for this shot. Now let's contrast this with where we started. And to do that, I'm just going to turn off Warp Stabilizer as it's playing. So here's where we started before, heavy camera shake. And here's with it on. In fact, what we can do is take our layer, let me stop this and we'll duplicate this and we'll call this shaky. And let's turn off the Warp Stabilizer for this instance and come over here to our rectangle tool. And let's draw a mask so that the top portion of our frame is our shaky footage and the bottom is our warp stabilized footage. Let's hit invert on the mask to swap the places. And now our shaky footage is on the bottom, all right? I'll remove that and step back into the Warp Stabilizer effect. And let's take a look at under the hood what is going on. If we go to advanced, you can see that we have an option here to show track points and essentially, what After Effects is doing, if I scale this up a little bit. So you can see the marks. After Effects is throwing a bunch of trackers into the scene, and over time, it's using math to calculate the distances and it figures out how the shot moves, so it can then invert that movement to stabilize the footage. It uses a few methods to do this. The default and perhaps best one is the Subspace Warp Method. We have other methods here. If I switch this over here to position, After Effects we'll only try to stabilize the footage using repositioning of the frame. You can see this much more pronounced if we change up our framing from stabilized crop and auto scale to stabilize only. You can see that we have this dark border around, and that's after Effects exposing the canvas or the background of our composition because it's repositioning the frame. We can also come over here to position, scale and rotation which After Effects will use those three properties. And we're still getting that heavy blackboard around there exposed. And if we switch to perspective, After Effects is essentially corner pinning our image to get rid of the camera shake. And if we come back to our framing options, you can see how the stabilized, crop and auto scale feature takes care of the black borders by introducing a scale up in our footage by, in this case, 110%. So that's how we're able to smooth out our camera shakes for this particular shot. Now, there's one other functionality that Warp Stabilizer helps us to achieve and that is to introduce Shake to other layers. So we're kind of doing the reverse. Instead of stabilizing the footage, we're actually going to add camera shake to another layer. So I'm going to stop this and we'll step into this 03 demo to show you what I'm talking about. Here, I've taken a layer and introduce the camera shake to that to make it appear as if it's in the shot. And the way I'm doing this is actually using two instances of warp stabilizer. One, to undo the camera shake which then allows me to insert other layers into the shot, and then a second warp stabilizer to reintroduce the camera shake. So with that workflow in mind let's come over here to our 04 start and rebuild this. So here, as before, we'll right click on our layer and track and stabilize Warp Stabilizer VFX. And while this is working, I'm going to step back into my project window under elements and I'll grab my IG post layer and drag that on top. And let's turn this off for right now since it's still work, since we're still working on stabilizing. And then I'll come back to effect controls and select my layer. Now here under the Advanced Properties, we have this objective, which tells after effects how we want to use Warp stabilizer. Instead of stabilizing the footage, we have this option here for reversible stabilization. Using this objective, After Effects is going to try to keep the frame as steady as possible. You can see that it's for the most part kind of stationary. So let's use this information to apply Camera Shake to our new layer. Let's right click here and come over to new solid. And here under this new solid, we'll make this the comp size and we'll say, okay, and we're actually going to use this solid as a placeholder for effects by hitting this adjustment layer button. Now I'm going to rename this reverse stabilize and I'll go back to my original footage. Let's copy this warp stabilizer effect, and I'll go back to my adjustment layer and paste it in there. After Effects gives us a warning saying that this only works on moving footage, but that's all right. We're going to fix that here momentarily. We'll come up here to objective and say reverse stabilization. This in effect, undoes the work that we just did for everything, but because this is an adjustment layer, if we now put this on top of our second layer, we're undoing the camera shake here with this first instance of warp stabilizer. And then we're reintroducing that camera shake with this adjustment layer on top. And that will apply the camera shake to our second layer here. So when we play this back you can see that our second layer is actually moving along with our shot. With a bit of repositioning of the layer in 3D space and the addition of a light, we'll have a similar result to what we saw at the start. So here we saw how to utilize warp stabilizer to fix shaky footage, as well as transfer that shaky camera movement to other layers composited in the shot.