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Mark Kauzlarich
Participant
June 4, 2019
Question

Stabilizing drone footage with unwanted rotational "skip"

  • June 4, 2019
  • 1 reply
  • 364 views

Hello!

I'm new to AE and working on learning the tools. There's a lot of really awesome and powerful tools to use but one I'm struggling to wrap my head around is stabilizing footage.

I flew a drone over a landscape and flew both forward and descended over some livestock that was running into the distance. At one or two moments, due to high winds, the drone rotated around its center axis causing a blip of motion in an otherwise amazing and cinematic landscape.

Because there's only a horizon with no great points to focus trackers on, and because the horizon goes from vast to smaller, I'm having a heck of a time stabilizing out those few blips. In fact my first attempt (Stabilize Motion, selecting position and rotation only on the X axis) made my the footage have more of that rotation.

Any tips on what I'm doing wrong? Thanks!

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1 reply

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Community Expert
Rick GerardCommunity Expert
Community Expert
June 4, 2019

Warp stabilizing probably won't work. When faced with a problem like the one that you are describing I usually cut the clip up into sections, motion stabilize the needed sections so there is no movement on certain parts of the video, then attach the motion stabilized sections to a null and animate the position of the null over time to smooth out the jitters making sure that the last frames in the motion stabilized section matches the first frame in the next part of the shot.

That is probably a lot for a newbie to process, but it should give you something to think about.

The most important part of any AE project is making sure that you pre-edit your shots so you are only processing the footage that will actually appear in the final shot. You'll hardly ever see a two or three-minute drone shot in a project. I shoot with an Alta 8 and Alta 6 all the time. I shoot with a Mavic Pro and a Phantom 4 Pro also, and most of the drone footage that I end up putting finished projects are less than 10 seconds. Before you spend a day or two trying to fix a 3-minute drone shot make sure that 10 or 15 good seconds will tell the story you want to tell. The average shot in a feature film is seven seconds. Michal Bay's average is around 3 seconds and they are very successful storytellers. Here's an interesting article: average-shot-length-

M
Mark KauzlarichAuthor
Participant
June 4, 2019

Thanks for your time and your thoughts on this. I appreciate it.

I have a lot of experience with the narrative editing aspect and clip length (thanks to Walter Murch's book for opening my mind to that). That feedback is a lot for me to process but maybe my editors at the publication I'm working for will have some experience. Otherwise I'll try to experiment before I contract out.

It's true that I won't need all 35 seconds in the final cut, however, without getting into too much detail, I had hoped to use a large portion of it for a parallax-scrolling type display with the piece I'm working on and that rotation happens right in the middle as you descend over a river and toward the subjects.

I will continue to try to experiment, though. Thanks again.

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Mark KauzlarichAuthor
Participant
June 4, 2019

How tough would it be to just re-shoot?  Your description makes it sound like you'd spend more time trying to fix  a questionable shot than you would getting a good one.


Lightning (literally) striking as a group of a few hundred buffalo and their calves running across a flooded riverbed toward a storm? Not am I not in the state anymore but it was a once in a lifetime kind of thing. But I get your point.

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