Stabilize video in DaVinci Resolve

These controls let you smooth out or even steady unwanted camera motion within a clip. The analysis
is performed in such a way as to preserve the motion of individual subjects within the frame, as well as
the overall direction of desirable camera motion, while correcting for unsteadiness.
These are the same stabilizer controls found in the Color page’s Tracker palette (minus the tracker
graph), and the resulting stabilization analysis is mirrored on the Color page, where you can see the
data visualized on the graph, if necessary.
A pop-up menu provides three different options that determine how the selected clip is analyzed and
transformed during stabilization. You must choose an option first, before clicking the Stabilize button
above, because the option you choose changes how the image analysis is performed. If you choose
another option, you must click the Stabilize button again to reanalyze the clip.

• Perspective: Enables perspective, pan, tilt, zoom, and rotation analysis and stabilization.
• Similarity: Enables pan, tilt, zoom, and rotation analysis and stabilization, for instances where perspective analysis results in unwanted motion artifacts.
• Translation: Enables pan and tilt analysis and stabilization only, for instances where only X and Y stabilization gives you acceptable results

The other controls let you customize how aggressively the selected clip is stabilized

• Stabilization Toggle: The toggle control for the Stabilization controls lets you turn stabilization off and on to be able to compare the stabilized and unstabilized image.
• Camera Lock: Turning on this checkbox disables Cropping Ratio and Smooth, and enables the stabilizer to focus on eliminating all camera motion from the shot in an effort to create a locked shot.
• Zoom: When this checkbox is turned on, the image is resized by a large enough percentage to eliminate the blanking (black edges) that is the result of warping and transforming the image to eliminate unwanted camera motion. The lower a value Cropping Ratio is set to, the more this off, the image is not zoomed at all, and whatever blanking intrudes into the image is output along with the image, on the assumption that you’ll have dedicated compositing artists deal with eliminating this blanking by filling in the missing image data in a more sophisticated manner. You may also leave this checkbox turned off if you’re planning on animating the Input Sizing Zoom parameter to dynamically zoom into and out of a shot being stabilized to eliminate blanking only where it occurs, using only as much zooming as is necessary for each region of the shot.
• Cropping Ratio: This value limits how hard the stabilizer tries to stabilize, by dictating how much blanking or zooming you’re willing to accept in exchange for eliminating unwanted motion. A value of 1.0 results in no stabilization being applied. Progressively lower values enable more aggressive stabilization. Changing this value requires you to click the Stabilize button gain to reanalyze the clip.
• Smooth: Lets you apply mathematical smoothing to the analyzed data used to stabilize the clip, allowing camera motion in the shot while eliminating unwanted jittering. Lower values perform less smoothing, allowing more of the character of the original camera motion to show through, while higher values smooth the shot more aggressively. Changing this value requires you to click the Stabilize button again to reanalyze the clip.
• Strength: This value is a multiplier that lets you choose how tightly you want to use the stabilization track to eliminate motion from a shot using the current analysis. With a value of 1, stabilization is maximized. Since some clips might look more natural with looser stabilization, choosing a number lower than 1 lets a percentage of the original camera motion show through. Zero (0) disables stabilization altogether. As an additional tip, you can invert the stabilization by choosing –1 when pasting a stabilization analysis from another clip to perform a match move based on the overall motion of the scene, and you can use a negative value either lower than 0 or higher than –1 to under or overcompensate when inverting the stabilization, simulating the effects of parallax where foreground and background planes move together but at different speeds.

About the Author

Justin Robinson is a Certified DaVinci Resolve, Fusion & Fairlight instructor who is known for simplifying concepts and techniques for anyone looking to learn any aspect of the video post-production workflow. Justin is the founder of JayAreTV, a training and premade asset website offering affordable and accessible video post-production education. You can follow Justin on Twitter at @JayAreTV YouTube at JayAreTV or Facebook at MrJayAreTV