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Stabilization: What does "Crop vs. smooth" do (and does it anything?)

Forum|Forum|8 years ago
March 24, 2017
2 replies
2114 views

Hi.

One of the most relevant features of a video processing software for me is stabilizing videos. I played around with Premiere Elements 15 (DE) and its options. I have read the manual page (Adobe Premiere Elements – Hilfe | Stabilisieren von Videomaterial mit der Verwackelungsstabilisierung ) regarding these options and tried them all.

However, the option "Crop Vs Smooth" (German version: "Freistellen und Abrunden") puzzles me. I read the German and English help text and I still don't understand what I am influencing here. Note that the German label has a slightly different and more confusing meaning. The probably more fitting translation would be "Zuschneiden vs. Glätten", if it is what I think it is.

The english docu says "Lower values are smooth, however, more of the image is viewed." This sounds stange, as it implies that you do not have to to decide between smoothness vs. a large field of view, but you can habe both by lowering the value? Then why should I ever increase the value at all? My suspicion is that one of the two statements should say the opposite. Would be nice if Adobe developers could shed light on this.

Anyway, I tried to find out its influence by changing the values from the default 50% down to 20% and up to 150% I tried this with 3 different videos, but I cannot see any effect on the output. Is it not working at all? Is the effect so subtile that it is hard to notice? Am I looking for the wrong thing?

Any help is appreciated.

Matthias

This topic has been closed for replies.

S

Steve Grisetti

Legend

So your issue is with the words "Crop vs. Smooth"?

matthiasbaslerAuthor

Participating Frequently

> So your issue is with the words "Crop vs. Smooth"?

More with its German translation. Since, as I described, I do not see any effect of this specific slider, I cannot know it is correctly labeled or not.

One issue certainly is that the description on the help page is irritating for me: Stabilize video footage with Shake Stabilizer in Adobe Premiere Elements

Matthias.

B

Bill Sprague

Community Expert

matthiasbasler wrote
> So your issue is with the words "Crop vs. Smooth"?
More with its German translation. Since, as I described, I do not see any effect of this specific slider, I cannot know it is correctly labeled or not.
One issue certainly is that the description on the help page is irritating for me: Stabilize video footage with Shake Stabilizer in Adobe Premiere Elements
Matthias.

Matthias,

If you are serious about improving video stabilization, you might enjoy the products from ProDad, a German company. (proDAD GmbH, Gauertstrasse 2, D-78194 Immendingen, Germany) I have their "Mercalli V3 SAL" and chose it for it's affordable price. The "Mercalli V4 SAL" is an improved version and one day I will upgrade.

("SAL" seems to mean Stand Alone. It runs independently of any NLE so can be used by all of them.)

My personal experience is that the Shake Stabilizer built into Premier Elements is pretty good. But my results from Mercalli V3 are better.

Bill

S

Steve Grisetti

Legend

The program smoothes out shaky video by locking onto a spot in the center of the video and moving the video around to keep that object in the center. To hide these movements, the program must zoom in a bit on the video.

The more the program zooms in, the more movement there can be and the more the movement in the video is smoothed out. However, zooming in compromises the video's resolution -- so the more you zoom in, the blurrier your video gets.

The program defaults to a Zoom/Crop of about 50% -- which is way too high, in my opinion. I've found I get a nicely smoothed video with minimal zooming at around 15%.

matthiasbaslerAuthor

Participating Frequently

Thanks steve.

I do understand the general way stabilization works and that there is always a tradeoff between resolution and smoothness. You answer confirms this.

But what I observe is:

The default Zoom/Crop of about 50% does not mean the effective resolution shrinks to half.
The tradeoff you describe seems to be handled with the "Smoothness" slider. I checked this by setting the video frame to "Smooth and crop" in order to check just how wide the crop margin is. I found that in general a smoothness of 50% results in heavier compensation movements, thus a smaller available frame/resolution than for 20%. Not a surprise.

So ... if the smoothness slider seemingly influences the smoothness vs. resolution, then the "Crop Vs Smooth" seems redundant???

Originally I thought that maybe "Crop Vs Smooth" influences the way the cropping rectangle moves over time within the original footage. But I cannot confirm this either.

I would be thankful for additional comments.

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