From the course: Making Your First Video in Final Cut Pro X

Stabilizing a video clip - Final Cut Pro Tutorial

From the course: Making Your First Video in Final Cut Pro X

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Stabilizing a video clip

- Now you may have noticed that some of these clips in your timeline are a little bit shaky due to the handheld nature of the shoot. Let's get Final Cut Pro 10 to analyze these, how to stabilize them, and then tweak the default parameters to taste. So I'm here in my chapter three underscore seven project. You can find that in your chapter three keyword collection located in the clay assets event of the library file that you have accessful to you if you have access to the exercise files. Or you could go along in your own project from chapters one and two. You might have noticed that some of the shots that were in this project have a little bit of a shakiness to them. For instance, I'm here over this specific shot in my timeline. I'm just going to press command equals to zoom in on it. It ends with shot seven zero one. - [Video Narrator] See the different buckets here? - [Lecturer] Ideally what we would like to do is stabilize this shot, and one great thing about Final Cut is stabilization is actually built into the video inspector, so with this clip selected, I'll head over to my inspector. For any reason if it's not showing, click on this little icon right here. You could alternatively press command four in order to review it, and we're going to scroll down past this stored section, over to stabilize. I'm just going to click on the stabilize button. The great thing about Final Cut is you'll see a little option that was just showing down there called Analyzing for Dormant Motion. It's already stabilized your clip. In order to stabilize it, it's actually punched in onto the frame, but let's just see what the default results are like. - [Video Narrator] See the different buckets here? - [Lecturer] We can see that it's much more stable compared to the previous shot. If I show the stabilization parameters, you'll notice that it's set to an automatic method of stabilization. But in fact, you have two different types to choose from. You'll see that there's an inertia cam as well as a smooth cam. And this just is depending on how your clip was shot. There are two different ways that you can apply your stabilization. Automatic just chooses the best one based on what it sees in the particular shot. There's one other thing I should mention, which is this tripod mode. Tripod mode actually takes your shot and completely locks it down. Something that we're not looking for in this particular example, it works really hard to stabilize that shot. Unfortunately, it sacrificed a lot of scaling in order to do this task, and we can see a little bit of distortion in this clip. You can see that it did try to lock down the shot in completion. I'll set this clip again, head back down to the stabilization section, and go back to tripod mode. I just noticed here that under the automatic camera, I have an option for smoothing, which will zoom in on my clip if I increase it, but stabilize that shot a little bit more, or I could decrease it, if I wanted to bring back a little bit more shakiness into the shot. But stabilization is a great way of being able to stabilize any handheld shots, if there's too much shakiness. To apply this again, I'm just going to go over shot 401, another selection here. - [Video Narrator] Pieces that belong to this particular studio. - [Lecturer] And there's just a little bit of unwanted shake here, so as before we'll select this clip, and in the video inspector, head down to the stabilization section, press and click this empty box. We will analyze for dormant motion, and when it's discovered what it needs to do, it might scale up on your shot, and apply automatic settings. What is kind of cool about this is the settings that were applied were slightly different from the first shot that we picked. In fact, now it's giving us control separately for translation, rotation, and scale smoothness. - [Video Narrator] The pieces that belong to this particular studio. - [Lecturer] You can see what it's done to the shot there. So it has scaled it up, but it's definitely stabilized it. And if you find that there's too much stabilization, or too little, we can adjust each of these parameters separately in order to fine tune how that shot looks. Just so we can see the overall results one more time, I'm actually going to do a full screen blow up, and then just press the j key to play back. And press k to stop, and let's just press l to play this back so we can preview it. - [Video Narrator] That belong to this particular studio. - [Lecturer] Awesome, so I press the escape key to exit out of there, and if these overlays are bugging you, we turned them on in a previous movie, so you can go to the view menu, and turn off my title and action safe zones. Well, that's how you stabilize a clip in Final Cut Pro 10.

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