A Comprehensive Guide to Making the Most of Adobe's Warp Stabilizer

nofilmschool by Robert Hardy

Digital post-production has come a long way since the Avid machines of the early 90's. Among the myriad post production tools that have surfaced in the past few years, none is more of a potential life-saver than Adobe’s Warp Stabilizer. However, despite the fact that it is fairly easy to get decent results with the plugin, it takes a little bit of know-how and practice to make Warp Stabilizer do its best work. Luckily, Jeremy Bircher over at the soon-to-launch story-driven stock footage hub, Story & Heart, has offered up the most comprehensive breakdown of Warp Stabilizer yet. Check it out.

First and foremost, the process of becoming a power-user of Warp Stabilizer requires that you become accustomed to all of the various modes with which the plugin analyzes and corrects your footage. They are as follows:

• Position: Stabilization is based on position data only.
• Position, Scale, and Rotation: Stabilization is based on position, scale, and rotation data. If there are not enough areas to track, Warp Stabilizer chooses the previous type (Position).
• Perspective: This uses a type of stabilization in which the entire frame is corner-pinned. Again, if there are not enough areas to track, Warp Stabilizer chooses the previous type (Position, Scale, Rotation).
• Subspace Warp (default): This attempts to warp various parts of the frame differently in order to stabilize the entire frame, as if it’s trying to isolate shaky parts of the image and then make them stable by distorting the pixels in that area. Again, if there are not enough areas to track, Warp Stabilizer chooses the previous type (Perspective). read more &watch the videos...