GH4 Warp Stabilize 4K on HD timeline

Harry Pallenberg

Harry Pallenberg

Well-known member
I'm still making the move from FCP7 to PremiereCC and one thing I'm trying to figure out is how to best use warp stabilize. I shoot 4CK and edit 1080HD. If I try and add the stabilize
it says clip & seq must match. If I do the the clip on a 4CK timeline then add the filter it is blowing the footage up - not what I want... I want to use all the extra pixels to do the stabilize in HD.

For example if I have the 4CK in a HD timeline and I blow it up to only 70% I still have 30% outside the frame that could be used to stabilize the footage.

So what is the best way to do it - other than some insane keyframing in the motion tab?

Also what is generally the best setting for motion? Subspace warp? and Framing - Stabilize, crop & auto scale?

Any other tips?
 
In your 1080p sequence, nest your C4K clip in its own sequence and apply warp stabilizer to the clip in there. From the framing drop-down list, remove "auto scale," by either selecting "stabilize only", or "stabilize, crop".

Then, back in your 1080p sequence, open the effects controls tab for the nested C4K sequence, and change the scale parameter under the motion dropdown to manually adjust how much you want to crop in on your newly stabilized footage.

There's lots of information you can find online about tips with warp stabilizer, but what I've found is that subspace warp is pretty much the go-to setting for when the camera is moving through 3D space. I use position, scale, rotation if the camera is bumpy but otherwise in a fixed position.

I somewhat covered your framing question earlier, but these are pretty simple to understand, but if your stabilized clip is larger than your sequence, you won't see the effect of these because they extend past the edges of your sequence, but:

"Stabilize only" simply moves the clip around in space without trimming any edges. This is useful if you plan on doing some of your own motion keyframing or adjusting, that way you retain all of the edges if needed.

"Stabilize, crop" does the same as the previous, with the added effect of cropping out the biggest possible rectangle with the same aspect ratio as your clip.

"Stabilize, crop, auto scale", does the same as before, but it then scales up the image to fit the sequence size. Use this one if you are stabilizing something on a timeline that is the same size as your clip, for example: 1080p clip in a 1080p timeline (you will lose resolution this way because of the upscaling). The auto-scale drop down should have a readout of exactly how much it had to scale up the clip to fit the sequence.

And finally, "Stabilize, synthesize edges" will analyze the edges of your frame in order to create a larger clip to avoid cropping. I find this rarely works with live-action footage and is better suited to something simpler like motion graphics.

There is no "best setting" for these, just use as you see fit.
 
Thanks. 'Stabilize crop' the 4K footage then nest then open in HD timeline seems to work well. I then scale it up to fill screen (or more if I need) and have plenty of pixels to spare on all sides. I'm sure I'll have more questions after playing around some more. Take an awful long time to analyze & render on my mid 2010 i7 iMac with only 8GB ram... sigh.
 
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