Enter Adobe Premiere Elements 10. I recently took advantage of a deal from B&H in NYC, purchasing the Photoshop/Premiere Elements bundle for under $100, having first assured myself that Premiere had a couple of tools I wanted. One was the Ken Burns effect that allows for animating still images with pans and zooms, another trick made easier with high resolution stills readily available. If you zoom into a 720 X 480 SD image you get blur almost immediately. But start with something 3000 pixels wide and you have considerable freedom to walk into the frame. The other was the motion stabilizer. I've proven to myself in recent days that I can shoot in good light with my Blackberry Tablet and get footage easily good enough for online presentation after using the stabilizer where necessary. Of course the combination has its limitations. There is no zoom available and panning must be done slowly to avoid jerky artifacts, but for a great many situations, material that would likely have gone unrecorded may be captured and edited into perfectly presentable, even commercial content - as in someone will pay you for it. I know I sound like I belong on the geezer farm when I say it, but ten years ago I would have read this as science fiction.
Thursday, May 10, 2012
Another option for stabilizing shaky footage
All videographers know how difficult it is to avoid unwanted motion in handheld footage. In the era of standard definition, stabilizing clips in editing software was of minimal help because the process involved zooming in and very quickly that degrades the image noticeably. But today even pocket HD and tablet cameras shoot 720p and that's sufficient resolution to get far better results. YouTube has offered a stabilizer in its online editing tool but in my experience it's not the solution if you want to retrieve stabilized clips to continue with an edit in your own software.
Enter Adobe Premiere Elements 10. I recently took advantage of a deal from B&H in NYC, purchasing the Photoshop/Premiere Elements bundle for under $100, having first assured myself that Premiere had a couple of tools I wanted. One was the Ken Burns effect that allows for animating still images with pans and zooms, another trick made easier with high resolution stills readily available. If you zoom into a 720 X 480 SD image you get blur almost immediately. But start with something 3000 pixels wide and you have considerable freedom to walk into the frame. The other was the motion stabilizer. I've proven to myself in recent days that I can shoot in good light with my Blackberry Tablet and get footage easily good enough for online presentation after using the stabilizer where necessary. Of course the combination has its limitations. There is no zoom available and panning must be done slowly to avoid jerky artifacts, but for a great many situations, material that would likely have gone unrecorded may be captured and edited into perfectly presentable, even commercial content - as in someone will pay you for it. I know I sound like I belong on the geezer farm when I say it, but ten years ago I would have read this as science fiction.
Enter Adobe Premiere Elements 10. I recently took advantage of a deal from B&H in NYC, purchasing the Photoshop/Premiere Elements bundle for under $100, having first assured myself that Premiere had a couple of tools I wanted. One was the Ken Burns effect that allows for animating still images with pans and zooms, another trick made easier with high resolution stills readily available. If you zoom into a 720 X 480 SD image you get blur almost immediately. But start with something 3000 pixels wide and you have considerable freedom to walk into the frame. The other was the motion stabilizer. I've proven to myself in recent days that I can shoot in good light with my Blackberry Tablet and get footage easily good enough for online presentation after using the stabilizer where necessary. Of course the combination has its limitations. There is no zoom available and panning must be done slowly to avoid jerky artifacts, but for a great many situations, material that would likely have gone unrecorded may be captured and edited into perfectly presentable, even commercial content - as in someone will pay you for it. I know I sound like I belong on the geezer farm when I say it, but ten years ago I would have read this as science fiction.
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