Rant: Warp Stabilizer

[Nathan Buck]

I'm sick of seeing this plastered all over footage. It's a last resort to correct footage or used lightly to smooth jitters in certain shots (such as travelling over a slightly bumpy road etc).

I've just watched a video from an event that looks like it was shot handheld on a 5D and it looks dreadful. Background bending and warping all over the place in virtually every clip.If you're putting warp stabilizer on every clip you shoot you're doing something seriously wrong and need to sort your equipment/shooting style out pronto! People using software/technology to fix their own laziness. It's extremely amateurish. At least learn how to use warp stabilizer properly rather than just whacking it on a clip and leaving it to 50% smoothness/default settings or whatever it is!

Rant over, have a lovely and pleasant day :)

[Noa Put]

Edius also has a stabilizer plugin that works well for static shots where some jitter needs to be taken out but once there is a cameramovement like a pan or tilt or if any object passes the frame the stabilizer get confused and warps the entire image. It was very rare I had to use hat plugin because my camera's had good enough performing OIS until I got my rx10 which has jitter in the image as soon as you start to zoom in handheld, it's so visible that I often had no other choice then to apply the stabilizer plugin, only in some case I had to leave it as the plugin made it worse by twisting the entire image.

[Nathan Buck]

I think it's fine to use occasionally - I apply it to remove small shakes quite often, and I'm not saying it's perfect, but generally you can't tell it's applied and I adjust the settings as best I can. Sometimes there is a shot that's so good you just have to use it! You can also get away with shaky footage if it actually looks handheld as it looks and feels more natural to the viewer.

What I dislike is people using it to fix every single shot and using it badly at that!

The video I'm referring to is here:

Blaydon Race 2016 - Video by Get Carter Productions - YouTube

I apologise in advance if the person who made it frequents this forum haha!

[John Wiley]

If it's not affecting you then there's no point getting mad about it. If your clients start demanding you shoot everything handheld and applying warp stabiliser, then it might be worth fussing over, but until then what purpose does it serve?

Like any injudicious use of effects, anybody doing this in their videos is likely not regular getting work, so it's not as though they are hurting you from a competitive business standpoint either.

[Gary Huff]

It's like CGI...you only notice it when it's done poorly.

[Andrew Smith]

Warp Stabiliser. It's for people who don't have a 'hail Mary' wide cam to switch to when you wobble/bump/bollox the main cam. :-P

Andrew

[Noa Put]

That's not a reason why people use such a plugin I think, it's mainly to stabilize dslr's that use lenses without stabilization.

[Andrew Smith]

I know, I know ....

Sometimes I use it myself.

Andrew

[Dave Morgan]

Depends what it is your doing but using after effects, and the motion tracker to stablize footage can be a lot faster. Its pretty easy to use once you know how.

[John Wiley]

I think the biggest problem with the warp stabiliser is that the cameras we are shooting with don't mix very well with it. Any time we have shakes that need removing, we also probably have severe rolling shutter. Often what you end up with is perfectly steady footage that looks like it's being stretched like elastic.

If you use Warp Stabiliser on footage shot with a global shutter sensor, it can be an absolute dream! Unfortunately not many of those exist these days.

[Darren Levine]

There's another scourge of the same coin: Youtube. that little magic "would you like to fix the shakey video" button has certainly tempted many users, and unlike warp stabilizer, has no settings or regard for sensibility.

When i use warp, i typically start at 1%, and frequently stay there.