Unable to Stabilze Video in AE Using Warp Stabilizer, Tracker or Mocha Pro plugin

Question

My goal is to stabilize a video clip of a person talking. I have a clip of video which was taken handheld where there is about 10% movement on the shot primarily up and down but a little side to side. The movement is not fast but it goes up and down a few times over about 8 seconds. The issue that I see is there is a metal railing in the foreground just behind the person being filmed and a blurry background that is about 100 to 200 feet away. The rail moves differently from the background. The first question is can this shot even be stabilized?

I have tried using AE Warp Stabilizer using many different combinations of all the and result has been either a bouncy video or a distorted wavey video which does not come close to working. I have tried the AE Tracker/Stabilize motion by using either a windowpane crosshair in the background or a metal railing in the foreground. I cannot stabilize the whole shot. I tried to use the AE Mocha Pro plugin using track and stabilize but again I am not able to get a stabilized foreground and background. Is there a way with Mocha pro to seperate these and recombine them so that they look stable? As of right now the only way I can think of to maybe fix this is to rotoscope out the actor (without the metal bar) and then refilm the background (without anything in foreground) and then combine those two shots. Does anyone have any suggestions on how to get a stabilized shot?

Rick Gerard · Answer

It sounds like you have parallax shifting between the foreground and background because of the camera movement. The only way to fix this is to separate the foreground and background elements and stabilize both of them, then put the shot back together.

You can see parallax shifting very easily if you just look across your room and out a window. Stand still for a moment and look at the relationship between the edge of the window and something outside like the tree across the street. Now move your head a little bit to the left and right and see how the edge of the window seems to move while the tree stands still. If you want to get rid of that movement you have to put the tree and the window on separate layers and stop the movement of both layers. Then you are going to have to fill in part of the tree that gets hidden by the edge of the window when the camera (your head) moves.

From the way you describe your shot, this is going to be very difficult if not impossible. As Mylenium said, without actually seeing the shot it's impossible to give you any specific guidance.

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