I have a number of videos to edit with some shaky camera work so I've been trying different approaches to stabilizing them.
I used Warp Stabilizer with some success although it took a lot of trial and error to figure out correct settings for each clip. Also, I found the only way to use it successfully with the concert video clips I'm editing is to break them into separate pieces based on framing -- mainly degree of zoom in or out - so that I can apply Warp Stabilizer separately to each one of these subclips, often with slightly different parameter settings. Otherwise if I try to stabilize a whole 6-10 minute song at once, Warp Stabilizer can't deal with the differences in framing throughout the clip and yields results that are absolutely unusable.
The downsides of applying Warp Stabilizer to separate subclips is that it's somewhat laborious to break the video into subclips and figure out the best parameters for each one. Plus then I have to edit the subclips back together, and since Warp Stabilizer adjusts the magnification of the framing differently for each subclip based on how much it needs to alter the clips to stabilize them, I also have to make adjustments at each edit point - which I did but inserting transitions between them to smooth out the changes in image size. With mixed results.
Looking for a better approach, I found a different Stabilizer from a company called NewBlue which offers a suite of effects and other plug-ins that you can add to Premiere Pro or other popular video editing programs. They offer their Stabilizer as a standalone plug-in for $99 or as part of an "Essentials" effects package with a bunch of other video improvement tools for $299, or as part of a full "Post Production Suite" of plugins called TotalFX which gets pretty pricy.
Their Stabilizer works on completely different principles than Warp Stabilizer, apparently, using a different kind of analytic engine, I guess you can say. It also is much more automated so that while there are some user-defined parameters you can set, it does a lot more of the "heavy lifting" in terms of figuring out how to stabilize the video and adjust the framing as a result. I found it works a LOT better than Warp Stabilizer in dealing with a whole segment, so there is no need to break the video into separate subclips and apply the effect separately to each one.
The only downside I've found is that in cases where there is a larger disturbance in the picture -- in the videos I'm working with, which are concert footage shot from the audience, the shot is interrupted by people walking in front of the camera at times, or blocking the shot with their heads momentarily -- NewBlue Stabilizer reacts by introducing wild swings in the picture and extreme warping momentarily. Which I dealt with by using the Opaque effect in Premiere Pro to temporary blacken the screen during these disturbances, then unblacken it once the stable picture has been reestablished.
So that required some extra manual work, but overall a lot less than using Warp Stabililizer. Some of the other effects in the Essentials package seem pretty useful, too -- such as a "Detail Enhancer" In general the emphasis with the NewBlue tools is on automating the effects more than Premiere Pro, which takes more manual adjusting with most of its effects to get good results -- but on the other hand, is also better because of that with things like Color Correction and other capabilities that are offered in both.
But if you need to stabilize footage, I definitely recommend taking a look at the NewBlue Stabilizer. You can download a fully functional trail version that includes a watermark to test it out thoroughly if you like.
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