VID · Video tools

Video Stabilizer

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Settings are written to the URL as you change them. Nothing differs from the defaults yet.

Take the shake out of hand-held footage. The export measures how the whole frame moves from one frame to the next, averages that path over a window, and moves each frame onto the average, with a small zoom to keep the edges out of view.

Smoothing window

The window is the half-width in seconds of the average the frames are moved onto. At 0.3 seconds only jitter faster than a few hertz is removed, and a walking bob stays. At 1 second, the default, walking bob and most hand shake go and a slow pan survives as a pan. At 3 seconds the path becomes a slow drift, and the correction needed to reach it grows, which is where the crop limit starts to bite.

Crop and zoom

The correction moves each frame by up to the crop fraction of its width and height. To cover the uncovered edge the whole clip is zoomed by 1 / (1 - 2 × crop): 5% crop is a 111% zoom, 8% is 119%, 15% is 143%. The hint under the slider shows the zoom for the current setting.

A correction larger than the limit is clamped, and that frame keeps the difference as residual shake. The export result reports the shake before and after as pixels of movement per frame, and the number of frames that hit the limit.

What is measured

Each frame is decoded at 192 pixels wide and compared with the one before it: the shift that best lines up their central region is the motion between them. Search runs at half resolution first, refines at full, and fits a parabola for the fraction of a pixel. A frame with nothing to match on, black or flat, reports no motion rather than a guess.

Only translation is estimated. A camera that rolls, or a scene where a large object moves across a static background, confuses a whole-frame estimate; the result on such footage may be worse than the source.

Output

The output keeps the source’s container and is always re-encoded, since every frame is redrawn. The resolution cap works as on the other video tools: 720p by default, source size when the detail matters. The soundtrack is copied unchanged when the container allows, which for MP4, MOV, WebM, and MKV is nearly always.

The preview plays the source; the stabilized picture is seen in the exported file.

Frequently Asked Questions

Side-to-side and up-and-down movement of the whole frame: walking footage, a hand-held phone, a camera on a moving vehicle. Rotation, zoom shake, and rolling-shutter wobble are not corrected, and a deliberate pan is smoothed rather than removed.

Moving a frame to cancel shake uncovers an edge on the side it moved from. The export zooms every frame by the same amount so the moved frame still fills the picture. The crop slider sets how much movement is allowed and therefore how much zoom: 8% crop is a zoom to 119%.

The measured camera path is averaged over that many seconds either side of each frame, and each frame is moved onto the average. A short window removes only fast jitter and keeps slow movement; a long window also smooths slow sway, and needs more crop because the frames stray further from the average.

A frame that needs more correction than the crop allows is held at the limit, and that part of the shake stays. The result reports how many frames hit it. Raise the crop or shorten the smoothing window, or both.

Two passes. The first reads every frame at a small size to measure the motion, which runs faster than playback; the second decodes and re-encodes the clip with the corrections, which takes about as long as playing it. The progress bar covers both.

Premiere's Warp Stabilizer and ffmpeg's vidstab also estimate rotation and perspective and can track features across the frame. The estimate here is translation of the whole frame, which is most of what hand-held shake is. It is right for walking shots and static scenes, and wrong for footage with large rotation or fast pans.

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