After Effects Tutorial: Stabilise your footage using After Effects CS5.5

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Adobe has introduced a new Warp Stabilizer with the CS5.5 upgrade to After Effects that automatically stabilises jittery hand-held footage. Although the ability to stabilise such footage has been with After Effects for a while, the Warp Stabilizer handles it automatically. Also, it’s far simpler than using Mocha to stabilise a shot. Now the only tweaking you have to do is adjusting the quality of the stabilisation. With DSLRs increasingly being used for video capture, the ability to stabilise quickly in your workflow is a valuable tool. And realising the increasing ubiquity of DSLRs for capture, Adobe has added controls to counteract the Rolling Shutter Effect you get with CMOS sensors.

Step 1

Import the shaky footage into After Effects and place it on the timeline. The Warp Stabilizer can be applied in several ways – we’ll use the Animation menu and select Stabilize Motion. In previous versions of After Effects this would open the Layer viewer and present the Tracker palette setup for stabilisation.

Step 2

Now in After Effects CS5.5 it applies the Warp Stabilizer. A message appears telling you it’s analysing the footage in the background and you can continue working on your composition. If you look in the Effects Control palette you’ll see which frame is being analysed and how much time remains. read more...