How to Stabilize video in Premiere Pro 2021

Hey, editor!In this tutorial we'll stabilize video in Premiere Pro. We already had a tutorial about Locked-on stabilization effect, which you can check if you're interested. 

The first thing, we need is to add a video to the Timeline. We can advise you picking the material from EasyEdit Viewer - you can find dozens of stock videos with Assets. It's very convenient, as you can preview any video, choose the needed one and add it to your Timeline. 

For our case, we've picked the video with a lot of shaking and smooth camera movements. Now go to the Effects tab and select Warp Stabilizer. In the settings, we can see how much time it takes to stabilize the video. The shorter the video, the faster stabilization.

Here's the result. We can see, that this effect did amazing job. All the shaking of the video is gone, and the smooth movements of the camera remain.  

Let's take a deeper look in the settings:Here we can clearly see, what is the result we want to get from our settings. Whether there will be smooth movement of the camera in the frame or the picture will be stable, let's apply the No Motion mode. In this mode, our video becomes completely static. It will look like it was filmed with a tripod. In this case, no additional settings are required.

Let's go back to the smooth motion. To remove small shaking of the camera, the minimum values in the Smoothness parameter are enough for us. You can control it from here:

We can see a small increase of these values, setting the Smoothness up to 50. We can see that the Auto-scale has gone up. The more we stabilize, the more effect will enhance our video.

Let's have a look at some methods of stabilizing the video.

Subspace Warp

Use it for this purpose - the preserve scale function, when enabled, the effect tries to preserve the original scale. But when we'll use it, distortions often appear. In the framing section, you can adjust the edges of the image. If you choose stabilize only, we get floating black edges, they are more noticeable at a higher stabilization value.

In this mode, the image is not enlarged. A black frame is created around it. And the video itself can be increased later in the Motion Settings with Scale option.

Stabilize, crop, auto-scale. This is a mode, this is a mode in which the image is stabilized and stretched to full screen with minimal loss.

There's also a Stabilize function, synthsize edges. It should not enlarge the image, but will complete the lost edges during stabilization. In this setting you can manually enlarge the image, and in this tab, there are more precise settings that you can turn to, if you are not satisfied with the initial stabilization. There are Fast Analysis buttons, this feature appeared in version 2021 and with it Premiere Pro stabilizes video much faster than in previous videos.

Then, there is a Detailed Analysis function: miscalculation with it will take longer, but we will gate a better result. It helps to correct many defects that could appear when creating stabilization in the usual mode.

Hope this video was useful for you! You can watch lessons on our Youtube channel - there are plenty of them for Premiere Pro and After Effects. See you in a week.