Thursday 10 March 2011

Stop motion image stabilization in After Effects

You can not fully appreciate the animation if the image is shake. The light could be great and the animation brilliant, but our brain still tells us... the animation is cute but its not quite great, "don't get mi wrong its nice..." we don't wont that kind of comments do we...also it is very difficult to apply masks and other effects on randomly moving images. Movement of one of the elements in the animation doesn't matter if its the original footage or the mask expose the line of the mask, setting the mask in the right place by hand on hundred of images can not be the only solution... I refuse to do it by hand... lets get read of those shake images... I was guessing that Premiere should have tool suitable for doing this, but 5 hours of researching tough me that the best software for this is After Effects, Premiere haven't got such option. There is a few other progtams but I was rather difficult to get them online. Previously I had few attempts of learning AF but never really got the hang of it. It looks that now I haveng got much choice. So I've imported the whole Premiere saved project to AF. I tried to work on the whole project from there and not going back to Premiere any more, but I felt that the program is not for putting the animation together. I bet that there is an option of deciding on the duration of imported images in AF but the time line is designed to add layers to individual object like videos or lingle images. Premiere is the software for sticking the images together...I think...that's my individual preference, but I find it comfortable. For now. So I decided on rendering and editing everything in Premiere and than importing the video to AF to stabilize the image. 

I imported the finished video to AF. Tryed few things with images stabilizer. Watched some youtube tutorials made by some tenagers... and seriously what is the point of doing a tutorial on something that is alredy on youtube... I looked through few of them as I was looking for some more datail info... but there are all the same... silly.
Anyhow, I managed to apply the stabilizations to the video, and the result turned out to be great. the diffrence was biger than I expected. But it created new problems. As the image was still now the frame surrounding the video started to jump... cutting it a bit down would be a solution, but I did not wont to change the composition previously established. I had to come back to Premiere and re-render the video without the frames... I also decided no to compress the image so that I would have the option of working on the peace without any limitations, and this way I'm avoiding problems with frame sizes. Also would be nice to have an original in full size on the hard drive... So I rendered the peace, and from an animation not even 2 minutes long I received 18 gig file (WMV uncompressed). A bit to big for my liking. My computer also seams to unappreciated that size and does not wont to open the animation in any software. In other words... my 5 years old computer is letting me down jet once again.
It seams that Ill have to compress the video into the best quality that I can, and that apply the stabilizer, get it back to Premiere again add the sound and maybe then export it without compression.... and as it goes for the 18gig file, Ill have to wait for a better computer to be dealt with. for now, it'll just hang there.

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