How to track motion with warp stabilizer in After Effects

Forum|Forum|7 years ago
August 19, 2018
3 replies
1573 views

I have been trying to find a solution, but can't seem to find any. I want to apply warp stabilizer to a clip and then track motion, to avoid the jittery track. But as soon as I enter into the track motion, it reverts to the clip without warp stabilization on it, which gives a really jittery track. Also I am a complete aftr6 effects noon. So am I missing something here? Any way I could do what I want without having to render the stabilized footage and then track the motion? Thanks.

This topic has been closed for replies.

Correct answer Mylenium

Why would you even want to do that? Applying the warp stabilizer synthesizes new sub-pixels, which at best results in a drifting 3D track, at worst in an unsolvable track because it mathematically no longer makes any sense when features magically teleport to different positions from frame to frame. It's simply a completely wrong workflow. You have to track the data first, do your VFX work, pre-compose everything and then apply whatever smoothing, be that using the inverse position data to compensate or indeed applying the warp stabilizer then.

Mylenium

T

tr_u_n_uisanc3Author

Participant

What I want to do is track a piece of text to an object, but the track turns out jittery. So how would I go about tracking the text smoothly? I have tried warp stabilizing the footage and then rendering it out and then bringing it into after effects and then tracking the text onto the stabilized footage which gives a much better track of the text. But isn't there a better option?

Roei Tzoref

Legend

you can simply precomp the WS shot. Then use the tracking tool of your choice on the precomp. I had this shot where it was very jittery (phone screen replacement). Doing stabilizing smoothing first and then tracking proved to work just fine And even the track was much easier than working on the shaky shot. You can see here before and after of the phone shot in the car:

https://www.tzoref.com/smartag

MyleniumCorrect answer

Legend

Why would you even want to do that? Applying the warp stabilizer synthesizes new sub-pixels, which at best results in a drifting 3D track, at worst in an unsolvable track because it mathematically no longer makes any sense when features magically teleport to different positions from frame to frame. It's simply a completely wrong workflow. You have to track the data first, do your VFX work, pre-compose everything and then apply whatever smoothing, be that using the inverse position data to compensate or indeed applying the warp stabilizer then.

Mylenium