How To STABILIZE Footage in DaVinci Resolve (QUICK vs PRO WAY)
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How To STABILIZE Footage in DaVinci Resolve (QUICK vs PRO WAY) - In this video editing Davinci Resolve tutorial, Will teaches you how to stabilize shaky footage and shows you how to do it the quick way that doesn't always work out well, and the pro way, which takes a little longer, but has professional results.
In today's video, I'm going to teach you two ways to stabilize footage inside Da Vinci Resolve. The first way will be the most straightforward and simplest way to do it, but it doesn't work all the time. The second way takes a little longer to do, but the results are much better. If you're new here, we have over 200 videography-related videos on the channel, lots of content for you to learn from. If you want to know the music or the equipment we use to make our videos, all links are in the description. All right, let's jump in, and I'll show you how to stabilize footage in Da Vinci Resolve.
All right, I have a clip loaded in Da Vinci Resolve, and I'm going to duplicate it. This left one will be the easy approach, and this right one will be the more professional approach. In many cases, you might find out that the easy approach ends up being just as good as the professional, but there are certain times where the pro approach will give you better results, so it's important to know both. So, with the first clip selected, up here in the inspector area, you can go down, and you can see where stabilization is. So, let's expand that, and then you have a few very straightforward options. We'll keep the mode as perspective, although you can change it to similarity or translation. We will leave camera lock unchecked because this footage is moving, as I'll show you.
Now, this is Ali walking, and I'm following her with the camera, so I don't want to have the camera locked, as that would simulate the camera being on, like, a tripod. But I do want the zoom to be enabled because when you stabilize footage, it does have to crop in a bit, so that corrects for that. Now, the cropping ratio depends on your footage. If you have very shaky footage, then you're going to want to crop a little higher, but we'll leave that at the default for now. Then, for smooth, this, of course, means how smooth you want the result to be. When I'm doing stabilization, I typically just move the smooth all the way to the right. I don't change any other settings, and again, this is the easy way to stabilize, but it doesn't work all the time, so let's see how it does with this clip.
So, as you can see, it did a pretty bad job on this clip. It warped the footage; it cropped in quite heavily. So, let's go ahead and bring back the smoothness, try to stabilize it again, and see if we can get a better result. So, that's a little better, although you can still see on the left-hand side here, there's some wonky stuff going on where it's kind of like warping all over the place. If you're familiar with Premiere Pro, they have something called warp stabilizer, and it basically does the same job as this. It'll sort of warp your image to try to stabilize it, but in many cases, it does not do a good job. So, we'll move smooth all the way back to the left, and it's still not doing a good job. I think that's because there's too much movement in the clip. There's not a clean, easy-to-see background, like a building with sharp edges. Instead, you just have sort of a blown-out sky and lots of out-of-focus trees in the background. Even the close stuff is more or less just out of focus, and there's nothing really of sharp contrast here for the stabilization to do its thing. In this clip, it proves to be tough for the regular, easy route of stabilization.
So, let's go ahead to our second clip and try the professional way, where you need to guide the stabilization to get a better result. So, we can go ahead and just, you know, turn off the stabilization to make sure we are not stabilizing it that way. We'll head over to Fusion, and between your in node and your out node, we will right-click on the line, go to add tool, go down to tracking, and we will click on planner tracking.
As you noticed, there were a few other options for tracking, and depending on the type of footage you're working with, you might find a better result working with tracker, for example, where you are selecting a specific point to track. Or, if you're trying to track, like, the flat area of a surface, then the surface tracker might be better in that case. But for us, since we're just trying to stabilize footage in general, we will stick to the planner tracker. With the planner tracker selected, up here in the inspector area, under controls, we have a bunch of options. So, under operation mode, we have track, steady, corner pin, and stabilize. The first thing to do is keep it on track because we're going to need to track first. Then, I tend to prefer to change the tracker to the hybrid Point SL area. In the middle here, you can see there's a green circle with some arrows, so we'll put our cursor right in the middle. That will allow us to move it, and we're going to select an area in our footage that more or less stays the same throughout. This area in the background where the trees are doesn't really move. The left side ends up going out of frame; the bottom here changes, of course, because Ali walks forward. It wouldn't make sense to put this on Ali because Ali is moving, and that will throw off the stabilization data. It also wouldn't make sense to put it in the sky because it's just one pure color. So, this is likely a good spot to start off with. From there, we will draw by clicking to make a selection of where we'd like it to track, and then to close it off, we'll hit the very first one we selected. We'll make sure that we're at the start of our frame, and then, if you need to make adjustments, you can. The point here is, because I know the ground here will be changing, I'm trying to exclude it and only have sort of the background of the trees selected. If I wanted, I could go a little further and expand some of this, but it's not really necessary, as I just need a certain size. It could probably be even a little smaller than this, but I think this will work well, and it's not going to take too long. Once we've done that, under motion type, we will keep it to perspective; output will be the background. Then, as a last step before we start tracking, under the reference frame, now we want to set it to set, and we are ready to go. So, we'll go to the third option here, which is track to end. That will start tracking from wherever your timeline is all the way to the end of the clip.
You can see up here, the tracking markers are sort of doing their thing as it analyzes your footage and completes the tracking based on your selection. Once that's done, you can go back to the starting frame, and then we'll go back up to the operation mode. Since we have now tracked it, we can then change it to stabilize to stabilize our footage. For the parameters to smooth, we will leave everything at default since we do want to smooth the entire frame. But if you did want to ignore, like, the rotation, for example, you could do that. Then, down here, where it says compute stabilization, we will click this, and then it will instantly stabilize your footage based on your tracking.
Okay, so now we are done; let's play it back. You can see now that there isn't any wonky changes in the background, but we are getting a little bit of cropping. That's because, again, this is the pro way, and we have to do things a little more manually. So, at the end there, you could see that the left side needs to be cropped a bit, and that's very easy to fix. So, down here in the frame mode, we go to crop, and then we go to scale, and we just scale in until it disappears. Go back to the start; we'll watch it again. That looks much better; we've stabilized the footage, and we have no warping issues. So, that would be the professional way to do it.
Now, of course, this isn't the only way to stabilize. There are numerous different ways to do it. Resolve is extremely complex, and there's always several ways to do anything you want to do in the program. But this is how I track and stabilize footage, and it does an amazing job pretty much every single time. Sometimes, you need to start over and choose a larger region or a smaller region or a different area to get better results. But this is an example of how learning Fusion can benefit your workflow. Sticking to the edit page because you're intimidated by Fusion is not going to give you perfect results all the time. So, it's okay to experiment a bit and try to get a little more familiar with Fusion because it will improve your editing and make you a better editor in the long run.
Okay, that's how you stabilize footage inside Da Vinci Resolve. There's two different techniques there, so depending on the footage you're working with, you can apply either or. I hope that video was helpful. If it was, give us a thumbs up and subscribe to see more videos from us in the future. We have over 200 videography-related videos, lots of content for you to learn from. Thanks so much for watching, and we'll see you next time.
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