Lessons

Lesson Info

Stabilizing Drone Footage in Premiere

So let me bring in a, um let me import in another file that we can stabilize here, look here. Which one would be good to stabilize that small enough? Actually, let's, take a look at collins clips here. There was one part portion here that I think would be good toe stabilize and again, if I want to select just a portion that I want to focus on, uh, let's go out to that shot. Might be good. And this is kind of a decision that I make also, while I'm, uh, editing, I look and see. Ok, what shot would be good here's one here to where he's turning a bit. That might be good, right about in here. I want to make it short because it takes a while for things to render. So let's, let's start about here I'm gonna hit I let me actually turn on our mouse pose a here so you can see what I'm doing at home I'll hit I on the keyboard, which will, uh, set my end point and I just scrubbed through a little bit here right before I go. So I'll hit oh, for my outpoint. All right, then I go back and I see which ...

clip that is that's my collins clips all the way over here we go collins clips and if I want to make a quick um uh sequence out of this quick way to do is to just click it, drag it down here or the new file and it makes it automatically makes a new sequence for me. The nice thing about that is it makes it exactly the right scale the right size, the same frame rate as the clip itself because I set my in and out points already it just gives me that little portion toe look at I'm not looking at the whole video on important note and why I did that and stuff just adding it to another sequence is because when we do stabilize footage in premiere it has to be in a sequence that's, the exact same frame ray in scale and everything as the original clip because it needs that data, you can't take a clip, scale it down and hope to stabilize it in another sequence that has to be an original clip. This is a point where I just want to stabilize this little clip here. So I come over here to my effects and I can go look for it or I can start typing in here in the little search window here and I know it's the warp stabilisers, so I just start typing in warp and then sure enough, there it comes up right here work stabilizer I'm going to click and add it instantly it starts analyzing that that clip data so I can come up here to my effects controls and I can see what it's doing is thinking and we open this up a little more here so we can see what it's going to do it's stretches out tells us what our time remaining is how many frames were doing and let it figure this out now I left it in its default here for the warp stabilizer there's two things involved here with work stabilizer another one I'm going to show you in a second here was with the piece of steve's footage where he had it kind of like the tall tripod is very stable but it could have been may be locked in another position this one the camera is in motion so if you're doing anything if the camera is in motion it's mounted to something it's flying it's driving it's surfing it's whatever or you're just simply panning anything like that then you always want to choose this option here the smooth motion option ah your other option is no motion that means this shot should not move this were locked on a tripod there's no way this shot she moved and that's helpful if you have especially with ariel videography if you've got just a little a little hiccup from a wind gust or something or you just you're tweaked it something wrong you can try you can try that that that that smooth motion and really try to crank it up so we'll see here I think there was a couple little hiccups here but this may have have smoothed it out here so let me try to play this through see if this will play through that really did a fairly decent job of stabilizing any little air hiccups in there and you could see how quick it did that. So another thing to look at too is this method here is the sub space warp. What that does is it looks at all the pixel data in there and it will try toe figure out through all its math and algorithms and all the techie stuff it will try to figure out okay what's moving what's warping what's what's what's happening in there uh and it will try to correct for that I I usually if it's a small clip like this I'll let it go ahead and look in that area if I look at it back and it looks like it's kind of turning into a rubber sheet then I'll choose this option instead position, scale and rotation instead and it still because you already analyzed its already analyzed the data it just goes through and does a different type of stabilization to it and sometimes it crops a little bit less is well, so I'll play that back and that looks like that's that's fine that's that's great! So when I go to render that out it won't be quite is crazy. So now what I could do since I've stabilized that clip I can also add that lens correction if I chose to but while I'm still in here let me show you what's I didn't mean to do that from zap f would you lend cracked before or after you stabilized? I'd stabilize first usually what I'll do is I'll stabilize everything that needs stabilizing and then either nest them into another sequence or I'll go ahead and render them out and then bring everything in as pre rendered footage on then just do my edit from that point and then make those other decisions like len's correction what? Not at the same time, but because we are stacking effects in here, we can add more than one effect, so it just depends on how you personally want to do your work flow this uh if it we just did stabilize only let it destabilize only this one may not move enough for us to actually see the edges but sometimes yeah it's actually not showing too much in there sometimes if you have a really bouncy clip and I'll I can try to pull one of those up too if we have time, you'll see that the edges that that center image will be good, but you'll see that black edges come in and you'll start seeing the thing rocking and rolling the edges all rock and roll around on your butt that the visual image in the middle states stays stays still and stable that's if you just do stabilize only without any kind of cropping now, synthesise edges allows you teo stabilize it, but it will then use kind of like a content where phil and try to synthesize data outside of those edges that make creep in. If you have a small enough amount of stabilization like in this case, then we can run that we don't lose any data, it might need to be pre rendered here because it's trying to do too much so it's kind of skipping ahead on us. Um, so in that case, it is much more processor intensive it's going to take more computing power and take more time to render. But if you have very, very little movement and you don't want a crop in that's a nice option to do so, but typically by default, stabilized crop and auto scale, you could see it just a little bit so cropped in zooms in on a little bit, it did re scale it up just a bit, but again, since we're working in two point seven k at this point I believe this clip may have been unless this is one of hiss I may be wrong in that says this one maybe ten eighty because we're flying several craft there so I could take a look here and know this one's ten eighty but typically if I'm shooting two point seven k that happens that's not my final you know, working resolution I'll be working in ten eighty and I can bring it down or I can crop more from that point so yes cousin on that jeff from ted, what is the difference between two point seven k wide in two point seven k cinema or the cinema is actually an extra wide uh, portion uh if somebody has to shoot it a much wider scale, you could do that that one's really going to show legs on your craft and everything it's going it's going toe really show everything that one's rarely used unless there's a way that you've got a gimbal sometimes if you're shooting like a uh n f I fifty, which is a hex copter and you've got a really long gimbel with the retracting legs and all of that, you get everything up out of the way you've got the camera hanging down enough or I've got a friend that builds these things and he's puts him on rails and he puts the gimbal out in front so the balances the battery on the back the camera's on the front makes a really nice stable reid and it gets the camera out away from everything so you can go really wide at that point if you want to want to shoot and they rarely do you ever see anything dipped down into the shot. And what about four k chuck and a couple of four case? Not great for video with a gopro just because you're limited teo, fifteen frame it's per second. So it's great for if you want to just capture a lot of of nice high rest stills. Yeah, it's. Great for that. Um, or if you plan on speeding it up, doing a time lapse type effect, then yeah. Then that's that's great. Um, but, uh, being able, teo being able to crop, being able to work in a normal video production environment that's it sze great to have that headroom extra headroom. So just last week, a lots been made, in fact, that the black magic pocket cam went down half price. Yeah, and so, I mean, this stuff is changing so fast that the whatever we choose today by next year there's going to be something that's going to be cheaper and lighter that's going to support yet another high resolution or wider saturation or something like that, right? That's a great comment I don'thave there's not really an answer there just because yes, I'll agree with you that's true and I've actually looked at the pocket camp as an option to get it on a gimbal I believe somebody has made a gamble for it it takes a larger little larger aircraft say like the three to robotics x a would definitely be ableto handle that but again it's all about the lands you know you've gotta have a lens that will work with that camera's stephen was telling us yesterday just putting the lens cap on hiss camera is enough to make it tweaked down. Taking the sim card out of the camera makes it go a little bit, so they're so delicately delicately balanced put in a uv filter anything like that on these things just make it just messes up the gimbal so you have to have the gimbal made or adjusted for specific lens and camera combination because they're so intricately balanced and even the gopro's I've tried putting on one those little sun shields and sometimes that's enough weight for it tio collapse under its own weight once in a while or any kind of filters of any kind will just make it collapse what I've done though, is my own make shift in the field is to just take a little piece of gaffer tape and kind of folded over but leave one edge sticky and I'll just put it right over the crown of the lens of the gopro, and that allows me to filter out some of the flutter that you see in the images. You'll see some of these videos from the quad copters where if it's starting to look up toward the sun or flying where their suns in the sky at a certain level it's the shadow of the sun, coming through the blades and hitting the lens so you see this black line fluttering going on and that's, not a stabilization issue that's it just position of the camera in conjunction to the light source and the blades so that's hard to avoid unless you khun block out some of that son with a little sun shade you experiment with a little piece of tape just make sure that tape doesn't like curve down or abandoned your frame then you created a problem right now and I've had that happen that's why? I know, but but sometimes the tape is great cause it doesn't weigh enough to make it, you know, mess up the camera at all. So, um, let's move on here. I want to show you, um I want to show you another, uh, clip here, let's, go to stevens clip let's, bring that in. Yes quick question from exo innovations and moonlit night are wondering about recommendation for the five point four millimeter lens to get rid of any of that fisheye effect would you do that? A ce faras putting in a third party lands in a gopro I'm assuming that's what they're talking about yes, I have experimented with some of those lenses as have romeo and marc who are on our show yesterday they've experimented with the rage cam's lenses and they've had some good results with those in fact, I I think the follow cam they're flying yesterday had a rage cam lens in it which didn't have much of the fisheye effect and they've had good luck with it I have tried some of those I've tried another one from po productions which is p p e a u ah they're they're a bit cheaper than the rage camps but the thing with the third party lenses still eyes across the board that I have seen the coding, the multi filament glass lenses and the coating on the lenses aren't quite up to the same amount of same value that go pros are by default so you're going to have a lot more chances of lens flare ah lot of more glare issues which may blow out your clouds things like that can happen but when the lighting conditions are just right and you can keep it away from the sun they can be beautiful so there's pros and cons to it he really have to kind of play with it so which means you have to buy two or three gopro's take one apart for the lens in it, you know and get it focused and get get that all set up and then just leave it leave that as a dedicated go pro that has that lens in it and then be able to swap him on the fly, not on the fly but I mean, in between flights so that's that is a very viable solution in some cases, but it does depend on that on the lighting conditions. Now I know that I've been sent some filters to try that are supposed to work with the clear lens cover that gopro makes for the hero threes in three plus, so I'm going to be experimenting with those I haven't even tried him yet, so I can't really talk on him but there's different nd filters things that may help some of that that's great and folks had asked about, well, well, that's great, and the problem is, is a lot of the andy filters out there like the snake river productions there there, filter said, actually takes a glass tiffin lens and that's great if you're not moving the camera's not on a gimbal, but when it's on a gimbal you can't add that wait so if you can use film like a failure film and andy filter fillmore polarizer film it's been die cut that fits perfectly inside this this cap and as long as that cap doesn't, you know, break the weight of the gimbal because I think most of the weight on that it's back in the base of the lands so again I'm going to be experimenting with it follow the facebook page I'll be posting any of my reviews or any of my testing and stuff up there tuesday again that's just a great place to follow as this stuff's happening it's breaking news folks so so that's that's that's a very, very good question and we're all about making solutions here so let me see there was one shot in here right in here if I scrubbed through that's a nice thing to you can scrub through and see uh what your footage is doing so I want to find a spot that it's moving mohr like right about here let's just take this at an end point I for in point and right through here actually, you know what I'm going to do two things at once here gets to make that my outpoint out and then you're right about here is in ok, so I'm going to do a quick stabilize on this go back out to my clips no come on all the way up here um, I'm used to using my own machine, and things are in different places here on the studio. Okay, so his clips and make a new sequence real quick, and I'm going to do a, uh, work stabilized on here, all right? And we'll see how fast this works with its analyzing this one, I'm going to say no motion. That's what? I wanted to show you here, and we'll just do position scale on rotation so it doesn't have to think as much we'll see how fast this actually works while we're goingto see that's not gonna work for us that's saying thirteen minutes. So what? I was going to try to stabilize this and then also re time it so let me get a a smaller clip then, uh, we just don't have time to watch this stuff, but I wanted what I wanted to do. I'll show you while we have the clip here. Uh, is I can write clip, right? Click on the clip here, right click using a mouse. I'm not used to it. Um speed in duration. I right. Click on the clip itself in the in the timeline and I select speed and duration and then I can go in here, just go right where says duration, click and drag down I don't want that to be, you know, two minutes long I want it to be just a few seconds I could do that or I could just go in there and type it just what I'm gonna do zero uh and then I only want it to be like oh, to you I lost my colin in there let me try this again I'm having a hard time seeing it on the with the little red dot in there, so I'll just do it manually no and o two and oh ok, so I'm making it two seconds long there we go now we got a nice little short clip here, not sure that since I sped it up if it will show or not, but well, we'll watch it back here so you see it's moving around a bit there that's kind of cool because we see those clouds moving I'm not sure if we're up stabilizer will work on three time footage we're going try that life and see no can't be used on this clip, so what I would do is I would have to render that out, render that clip out, bring it back in and then stabilize it so what I'm going to do instead is come back up to his original clip here I'm going to pick a shorter period of time here where it's moving a bit maybe write about in there it's moving a lot right there and then over here out and now we'll make a new uh, new clip here we go back up here and I'm just gonna make a new sequence from that clip that made it shorter and it should only be a few seconds long all right, so now I can warp stabilize this clip because it hasn't been affected come up here, I don't want smooth motion I want no motion and we'll just let it do a position scale on rotation so this only take a minute or so um so what I'm trying to do is because in this little piece of the clip the copter did move a little bit, it did vary a little bit, so I think what's going to happen here is that it's going to lock it down it'll probably crop a bit because any time you've got some side to side motion or up and down motion is going to try to center the focus point of the of the content in the image is going to try to centre all of that and it'll crop around it, but this will also if it does crop it quite a bit, then we'll be able to see what happens when we take it out of the auto crop and you'll be able to see what happens in the background with the black edges that come in so are coming in on about sixty percent on this clip this was actually shot this clip here was actually shot with a cannon five d mark three andi I believe he said what his settings were yesterday I don't have her memorized but he said what is exposure settings and everything we're on this and I think is the twenty four millimeter lens that he that he used on this twenty twenty four to two point eight I believe I don't know if anybody else remembers that yes how much does he do sixty okay okay sure okay great thank you for that so sixty sixty francs per second twenty and ok for photos okay got you all right so let's take a look at this and see what it did if it stabilized it so it should just look like it's taken from the top of a building somewhere shouldn't be any emotion at all it's just stable so if we turn on and off work stabilizer it really didn't crop that much not as much as I thought it was going to so if we turn this to just stabilize only now let's watch it back you'll see the black edges that come in a cz telling you it's not radical it's not ah lot of radical movement but you'll see it starts creeping you'll see the black edges kind of creep in here on the bottom coming up and that's how much that it's stabilized so by doing the crop there otto the what come on stop thank you by doing the stabilized crop and auto scale it will crop it and pull it up to match um and that's enough if because this is ten a teepee if I was still editing in ten eighty p that's enough that won't bother me too much but if it was really rocking and rolling and shaken and it had to really zoom up then I'm gonna have a lot of data loss because I've I've taken something I've essentially stretched it all out and if your photographers you understand that from shooting throughout the years with azaz we've gone from just a couple of mega pixels for a digital camera too you know fourteen and above you know looking at some of your old photos and you try to blow him up you just can't go oh no that data is gone forever because that's what it was shot on back then and that's again that's that the beauty of film for photography uh you shoot with film you can always re scan that film as long as the film is okay and always reese can it later with better technology and the only thing then you've got to deal with this film grain so again there's something to be said about that as well and how many of you have lost like years of your life to data loss? Yeah okay there's that too, especially with video production I've got sometimes I'll get clients that contact me seven or eight years later and say, hey, do you have this such and such a I don't even know if I can mount that hard drive I may have it on a backup drive and may have you kept moving it forward moving it forward and I try to do that but sometimes stuff is just too old I'm sorry I don't I sent you a dvd at the time so is then your responsibility to keep it backed up on your end then so that's something you have to really consider too if you are working commercially, where does the data uh go? Who holds that? You know what do what do you do with that? So those are all very important things. Um I'm going to get into another portion here uh, outside of stabilization let me just hide this for a minute and that's playing with some of the timing of these things I, uh have one. I'm not going to play the whole clip for you, but I am going to play some of this. I I shot this again. This was with regular phantom um we were planned with our horse chasing her around with the phantom she likes to play with that she's very playful horse and I shot this all is again very low res at the time too because it was one hundred twenty frames per second but I think it was like for a dp or something like that but it was shot with but watching it back because I was able to re time that footage it compressed time ah I was able to see the slow motion mixed in edited in with regular motion so I'm gonna play just a minute or two of this this does have audio too I believe so you play this ah wait wait wait okay, so there are points in here where it actually goes more teo really time that's what the portion I think it may be right here will be just advanced ahead two that's you can wait so you can see when it goes from a little faster motion down too slow motion even see the cars in the background go from real time to slowing down and that's actually an a type of edit that is done a lot with commercials that car commercials and whatnot. So let me open up a file here really quick and let's um let's just keep it all simple here it's just imported in our existing piece here is, uh, racetrack here all right two things I want to show here somebody had asked a question about audio in your your camera you know how does how does audio work? How do you get audio? But by nature the gopro unless it's in, you know, soundproof case or waterproof case, won't you still pick up some sound? But most the time it's in a gimbal it's it's exposed the audio is actually recording at same time. So if you've got a clip that you shot with a gopro, this is how it comes out typically and you hear all the noise, okay, so what I'll do in premier, usually with most video, if it's if it's, um b roll or anything I'm editing and premier, but almost always with with aerial video is all right. Click on the track out here in the project panel and I'll go to modify audio channels and I'll just change that to zero, okay? And that just just cleans up the audio takes that takes that out and the reason why I do that instead of just taking the audio out from within the sequence is because that way, no matter how I I use it like right now if I was to click and drag it over and make a new sequence from it. The audio is already gone. I don't have to deal with muting it. I don't have tio unlinked kit and delete it. I don't have to mess with it at all. It's just it's already gone. I'll never need it. I'll never want it, I won't use it. So in this particular clip say I've got, uh I just want to do a quick edit on this, but this is one flight where I came around the race cars just one car on the track zipping around the track and I wanted to capture that kind of like this intro right here. So I want to also keep it all is one clip because I think it's kind of cool that one copter, one car it's going around the track and I'm able to come over here and then catch it again on the other side of this loop, you're going by there, so to keep that all is one clip, but not make this, uh, a minute and a half long I make started right about here haven't come away from there and then all hit see for my my razor tool, my cut tool, and I'll cut right there and I come down here to where the car starts coming down the straight stretch there, right about where we can actually see it before the copter turns so I'll cut right there and then I go around here so it flies out of sight there we g o gonna cut there then I'm going to come over here to this side of the track wait till I start seeing it come around here about there and then out it goes so I may just go ahead and cut the end of the clip off altogether so what I'll do is all I'll just ripple delete this guy out of there if I had other clips following it or you could just hit clear but what I want to do is I want to re time these long stretches in between events so I've got three events here I've got the beginning which is coming away from the windmill I've got this event here where the cars going by now flying across the track in the cars coming by there but I want to kind of kind of compressed time here, so I'm going to click on these long boring stretches into right click and go to my speed duration and again I'm doing just going to type in how long I want them to go, so I'm going to say I just want him to be one second each all right then I can ripple delete this blank area and they're compresses everything now this other long boring stretch here I can go in there do my speed, duration make that one second one and zero ripple delete that big boring section and shouldn't have to render this so it should just play through so starts off nice and smooth that zips over to the track comes the car takes off flies across really quick there comes the car again and there it goes add some text and some color and maybe lens correction to that whole thing you've got instant car commercial so got question back here quick question where's your where you positioned and this shot like where are you flying from? I'm flying from over where the pit our I'm actually over here I don't think I show in the sky he could maybe see me over here um but I'm I'm like right over here right here on the corner this's all f p v flying I had a monitor andi actually, this clip the original clip goes I was able to go pretty much anywhere on the whole track. This is thunder hill race track and it was a practice day they allowed me to go and fly with permission. In fact, if you're local and you want to be involved thunder hill raceway on facebook uh check them out they're gonna have a drone day specifically for your own flying in october I believe it is so let's go check him out on facebook they're going they're going to open it up for people so I hope they don't get mad at me for telling everybody about what they're putting it out there they want people there is that vision plus f b v or is that what this is all gopro on a dslr pros kit okay uh yeah that's that's the one that I actually mark mark johnson and romeo were taking that that I was working with yesterday I was going to fly it originally we kind of ran out of time but yeah dslr prose makes really hot rod gear they are filmmakers themselves so they understand what filmmakers need they make some amazing gear but their gear is great it's it's a special packaged gear for filmmakers and I use it I use a lot really dio got another question why do they call it ripple delete that's just that's just added in term that goes back to the linear editing days yeah it's just a lot of these non island lot nonlinear editors will use film technical terminology in tools just like photo shop uses you know dodging burn unless you really ever did anything in a dark room he'd have no idea why they called something like that so again ah lot of a lot of tools that we use today digitally go back to traditional days so I thought this was an interesting question just jeff from concussion in the chat rooms interesting name speaking of data earlier do you give your client's raw camera footage? I've heard many videographers that do not release their footage but only give produced footage what's the general practice out there and if you're just a flier in a shooter how easy is it toe work with editors that's a that's a really good question because it really depends on the production some productions I've done stuff for clients where you're hired to just shoot it's no different than if you're just hired to be the cameraman in a studio for the day you hand over the sim card you go out there fly you hand over the sim card they take it from there they own all the material all the rights and everything actually actually this production here I was given the permission from the producer to use this clip on a couple of their clips in promo but this is for a documentary for bmw race team and uh actually I'll plug the movie it's ten tents so ten tenths the movie markko salorio it was the producer and the dp on it is a good friend of mine uh hired me to come out there and chase the cars around a little bit for the day so in that case that was like hand over the data on the spot they own it all you don't do anything with it unless they give you permission to use a clipper to um in some cases where you do it, somebody's hired you to shoot something they don't want all of that, they don't have editors, they don't have any just give us something beautiful at the end, it's no different than photography, you know, in the in the days of shooting, handing over the roll of film, you know, to the agency, you, you're you're done, you know, and you better be good, you better I've done it right now that everything's digital, you can at least verify how good you're you're doing when you're shooting, but when it comes to video, it really depends on per case per case basis. In that case, if it's something where I've retained all of the original footage and I've edited it, I've work stabilized have done all of that, which I typically do with with aerial footage and less I'm giving it to somebody that knows what they're doing, I'll massage it, make it beautiful and hand over those clips, and then they can edit him into there their own use. But then I'm also responsible for holding on to that raw footage for a certain a certain amount of time, and I think that's something that has to be negotiated uh case per case, um is to whose responsibility is it? Hang on that footage and for how long what we are going to do we have a very special guest uh he's joining us here again at creative I've let's talk about dr brown and what he's going to be doing doc brown um yeah I love russell he's a great guy he and I went out flying when were first starting all this stuff I took him out when he first got his first phantom we went flying and went around san francisco and went someplace is I ended up losing mine into the sand upside down so I was done for the day he flew till he broke the props ofthe hiss wait cobbled his back together he gots more flying out of the day we just had a great time together so russell is an avid flyer he's an avid photographer he is you know the photo shop god of sorts he won't say that but most of us will because he is he's been highly instrumental in this movement with d j I too to get the raw image data from their cameras so he's been very instrumental in making that happen I have high regard for him and his work I have no idea what he's going to teach us I just know it's going to be amazing because everything he does is amazing I'm actually going teo photoshopped world with him coming up and he's got this amazing film making workshop that he's doing out at nelson nevada and I get to be part of the team to work with them and show him howto edit some of the video footage, so I'm excited to work with him again. I'm really excited that we get to bring him in here fantastical, we're excited to have him two wanted to share some more facebook love it, jeff from the sandy kinsman, this ingrate course I was about to sell my phantom, but after watching so far realized that there are things that I conduce oh, that solve my visibility problem. For one example, thanks for setting up the facebook page that you did for us flyers and in parentheses occasional weed whackers wei have people joining us of all different levels, so thank you, sandy, and that facebook page that we're talking about is, uh, the drone workshop facebook page that jeff has set up for us to continue this conversation after today as how we have two seconds left of this workshop, but that page lives on, and that is facebook dot com slash drone workshop dot us or just search for drone workshop.