Warp Stabilizer shake/jitter

[ChromaFilms]

Hi.

On the last few versions Warp Stabilizer in Premiere has been unusable for me. Introduces violent jitters into the footage, far far worse than what I was trying to fix.

Been hoping for a fix but with another update been and gone and no improvement I thought I'd try and get to the issue.

The image shifts so much frame to frame that the 'jitters' almost look like jump cuts.

I've tried different formats, deleting cache, even wiped the HDD and did a fresh install from OS up. And as I said before this has spanned multiple updates now. Possibly was introduced when it first changed to Warp Stabiliser VFX.

My current fix is the old way of the round trip to After Effects and back which still works great, but a few extra steps for something I used to be able to do within Premiere.

The jitter is far better in a progressive timeline but even then the quality looks very average even with adjustments to smoothness and checking Detailed Analysis, etc, etc. I still wouldn't call it acceptable quality.

Not the end of the world but just a bit annoying as in the past it's worked very well for me, and would quite like the easy option back!

Running latest Premiere on iMac Retina 5K 2017 model, 4.2Ghz i7 with Radeon Pro 580 8gb card. OS High Sierra 10.13.4

Thanks for any advice.

[kjetilfk]

I also see the problem that the warp stabilizer introduces small "jumps" at some time points in the footage that was not there in the unsmoothed footage. For example, it may skew the horizon a bit from one frame to the next. This is clearly noticable in the smoothed footage and almost look like the footage was cut at some time points. I don't think this problem was there a few versions ago. Appears to be a bug. Basically makes the warp stabilizer in PP useless. Hoping for a fix soon.

[RobShultz]

If you have access to After Effects you may want to look up a tutorial on how you can smooth out the Warp Stabilizer VFX effect in AE by deleting track points.

[ChromaFilms]

Thanks Rob but as the effect works fine when applied in AE there’s little point going to too much effort modifying tracking.

It just doesn’t work in Premiere anymore so I have to do the AE round trip. Like I said, not the end of the world but just a bit annoying as used to work a few versions ago.

Cheers!

[Media Editor]

I have the latest version of Premiere on a PC.  The Warp Stabilizer is so slow that I use Davinci Resolve 15 to stabilize.  It is faster than Premiere.  I used the same video clip to compare the two stabilizers.  Premiere took 27 minutes.  Resolve took 7 minutes.

[Media Editor]

I have a new Dell Desktop XPS 8930 with an i7, 16 GB of Ram, 6 Core Processor, 12M Cache, up to 4.6GHz.  It stabilizes the video clips better than Davinci Resolve 15 in about the same time.

[Carlos Ziade]

How are you treating your clip on the timeline ? is the sequence matched to the clip ?

if so, what kind of footage are you working with ? Warp Stabilizer and all effects that

analyse data, will need enough data and the higher the quality the better the analyse process ...

if you are working with previously encoded footage, that is a definite reason for abnormal

data and pixel interpretation ... Warp Stabilizer works best with original footage without any

other effects added, if you want to add further effects, nest your sequence after applying warp

and add other effects on the nested ...

I hope this helps

[ChromaFilms]

Hi.

Thanks for your reply.

I use a few different cameras (FS7, F5, Canon XF300, A7R2, a6300, Dji, GoPro, etc) mostly native HD but some transcoded to Prores and it doesn't seem to matter what format or sequence setup, although it's definitely not quite as bad on progressive footage. However we're required to deliver 1080i for broadcast.

No other effects applied. I tried nesting just for the sake of it but no luck.

I'm doing nothing different to what I've done previously but it just stopped working after an update a couple versions ago, now forcing me to go to AE if I need it stabilised.

I should have paid more attention to the exact update but as Premiere is by far the buggiest piece of software I've ever used and they consistently seem to "break" stuff when trying to serve up the latest and greatest features, I just figured it'd come right in the next update. But there's been a few updates now. It may have been the one where it turned into 'Warp Stabiliser VFX'.

I'm thinking it might be a mac specific issue as I notice a few people are finding it buggy.

2018 Premiere Pro Warp Stabilizer Jitter

WARP STABILIZER VFX BUG (CC2018)?

Cheers.

[ChromaFilms]

Forgot to mention there's no difference between GPU acceleration or Software Only. Not sure if Warp Stabilizer uses it anyway.

Cheers

[Carlos Ziade]

I think Warp Stabilizer uses GPU acceleration, Premiere relies too much on the GPU, unlike After Effects

It's not just a Mac issue, I tried on Windows sometimes it causes trouble, sometimes not, depends on the footage

if it is encoded or no, how you shoot on camera.. the most important thing is that these kind of effects require

as much data and pixels as possible to be able to analyze each frame properly ...

check this out :

Fix Shaky Footage with Warp Stabilizer in Premiere Pro

VENTURESOME: How To Stabilize Shaky Footage in Premiere Pro — Premiere Bro

[ChromaFilms]

I'd say 90% of my stuff is XAVC-I which tops out at 600mbps and generally takes up a lot of space, so I don't think it's a data issue. But yeah, issue is still there with XAVC-L, XDCAM 422, ProRes, everything.

I could apply it to a fairly smooth shot and it'll manage to make it look like an earthquake so I don't think I just haven't got the settings dialled in quite right! I've stabilised 1000s of clips in the past and been very happy with the results.

I think this is a new (ish) Premiere issue.

[Carlos Ziade]

I think so, I agree with you ... Hoping to get a stable update soon that fixes all those stuck issues

before going forward to Artificial Intelligence and all this not much necessary stuff for now

[JBIRD484]

Have you tried getting it as close as possible, nesting it and adding warp stabilizer again? 

[defaultftpvjo2seqxa]

thank you, this helped a lot!

[Autumn223782273e4p]

2021 fix-- my stabilization was skipping and I was unsure why, but I found the fix. The clip needs to be completely unedited including trimming of any kind. Like someone in this thread mentioned, the computer needs enough uninterrupted data to process correctly. When I lengthened my clips out to full length, then applied warp stabilizer, it worked without the skips! After it is applied, you can trim as much as you'd like without it affecting the stability. 

[Kevin-Monahan]

Hi,

This post is old. If you are having trouble with Warp Stabilizer, create a new post.

Thanks,
Kevin