Quote: Thing is, when you crop the video, you have all this excess, waste footage on the periphery of your video. Hence is there a way to tell PD to apply the stabilization using this excess, rather than cropping even more inside of the already cropped frame?

Only in a two step process.
1) Apply the stabilization to the clips that you desire and then "Produce" a video in the same or higher format specifications as your desired final project output.
2) Bring the stablized footage into your real project and then crop as desired.

Jeff

That's what I thought. The problem with that approach is that step 1 will result in a slight amount of upsampling, then with step 2 you still don't end up with the native resolution you desire.

Let's say you start with 1080p video. Applying image stabilization will trim a few pixels off the borders (who knows how many), resulting in slightly lower than 1920x1080 native resolution. You can't simply save the video file(s) as-is (without producing) or produce at whatever the existing resolution actually is, you have to select the output resolution (say 1080p again); hence the result is upsampled to a degree to get back to 1920x1080 when you produce.

Then once you import this slightly upsampled video and apply a crop, there's no way to achieve, say, exactly 1280x720 of the original video pixels. The end result will always result in some amount of up/down sampling to achieve the production resolution (720p in this case).

Why can't we just tell PD what our end-goal is (in terms of pixel dimensions) and let it figure out how to optimally apply the cropping and stabilizing?

Another idea would be to have a stabilizer tool embedded in the crop tool, such that when you crop the video you can select an option to apply stabilization as well, but outside of the cropped frame instead of inside.

A third idea would be an option to set the number of pixels that are removed during stabilizing, so that you know exactly what the resolution is after the stabilization, and you could then adjust for this. I don't like this idea as much however because with PD there's also no way to set the number of pixels that are removed during cropping.

Hi AllanSmithee -

Without trying to over-complicate your question, I just did a few calculations that might help maintain quality & limit upscaling.

These calculations were made by applying the standard PDR stabiliser at different settings, taking snapshots & measuring the degree of cropping. I don't pretend they are "pure", but they're pretty close!

Original Video Resolution 1920x1080

• Stabilser set at 20 = 1842 x 1036


• Stabiliser set at 30 = 1806 x 1016


• Stabiliser set at 40 = 1760 x 990


• Stabiliser set at 50 = 1728 x 972

Following your thinking, about avoiding upscaling... after stabilisation you could produce to a custom profile (based on degree applied) - then crop the produced file before final render in 720p.

I may be over-thinking

Cheers - Tony
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Tony,

Awesome thanks. No you're not overthinking and this is what I was going for. It's nice to know the proportion of the video that gets trimmed using the stabilization tool. I wonder if this varies video to video though, and with the rotational tool selected or not.

The problem now is figuring out how to take off exactly, say, another 316 pixels using the crop tool, haha.

Anyway, yes that's what I'm looking for, it would just be nice if we could get PD to "do the math" for us.

As we say over here in OZ: "It's a bit how-ya-goin", which means a fair way short of being correct!

It certainly would make a difference if you're also applying either rotational camera shake or enhanced stabilizer! e.g. Setting stabiliser at 40 (1760x990) then applying rotational camera shake crops the original 1920x1080 to 1742x780 - using the same bush calculation methods as before

And yes - in Video Crop - calculating the degree of crop has the same level of guess work/estimation.

Using the process I described above, I stabilised & cropped a 1080p video & produced to 720p. The process works well. You'd only need to do the Maths once, if you were applying the same level of stabilisation & crop to all clips.



Cheers - Tony
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Really nice to see this sort of exchange of Q and A.

I've often wondered how much of the source video was taken off of the original clip when stabilization was applied and never really experimented to find out just how much.

But you two have nailed it down quite nicely. Thanks!

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Quote: And yes - in Video Crop - calculating the degree of crop has the same level of guess work/estimation.

Using the process I described above, I stabilised & cropped a 1080p video & produced to 720p.

Hmm.. interesting. How did you get the crop to be the exact number of pixels you wanted though? Trial and error? Or is there a way to numerically enter how much to crop?

Quote: These calculations were made by applying the standard PDR stabiliser at different settings, taking snapshots & measuring the degree of cropping.

Tony, in PD13 at least, when I apply the stabilization and subsequently take a snapshot, the snapshots have the same 1920x1080 resolution as well :/ although they do appear to be zoomed in to the same degree, which is confusing.

I'm trying to use a stabilization setting of 20 with rotational shake and enhanced stabilizer both check to yes.

Hi Allan -

As you've discovered, you can't be guided by the snapshot resolution, unless it's a snap of a produced video (after stabilising or cropping). As far as the "snapshot machine" knows, it's 1920x1080... until you render it. It's the same in PDR14.

Here - a snap from the 1760x990 produced video is 1760x990.

I did say there's a bit of guesstimation involved... For this example, forget about stabilising for a moment. If your video is 1920x1080 & you go to Video Crop & turn on the 10x10 grid lines. Each horizontal grid line is (in theory) 108px apart. That's where the guess work comes in.

Do you see where I'm going? Like I said, "a bit how-ya-goin".

Sometimes I use a grid overlay (like the one attached) to help with calculating crops etc. The grid is 1920x1080. The thicker lines are 100px spaced. The finer lines are 50px. There's still a bit of guess work involved, of course.

There is no way to do any of this automatically or enter a numerical value in PDR.

To your previous question, though I haven't tested thoroughly, if you set the stabiliser to (say) 30 on a number of different clips they'd all be cropped by the same amount.

Cheers - Tony
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Quote: As you've discovered, you can't be guided by the snapshot resolution, unless it's a snap of a produced video (after stabilising or cropping). As far as the "snapshot machine" knows, it's 1920x1080... until you render it. It's the same in PDR14.Tony

Hi Tony, Sorry but I'm still a bit confused. If you produce the cropped video, the output resolution BECOMES 1920x1080 because it gets upsampled to whatever you set the output to be (no way to set the output to the current native res). How do you take a snapshot of a produced video then, and determine the cropped resolution?

I guess what I'm saying is, are the resolutions below the actual resolutions of the snapshots, or were they based on estimated custom resolutions which were based on estimations from using the grid?

Quote:

• Stabilser set at 20 = 1842 x 1036
• Stabiliser set at 30 = 1806 x 1016
• Stabiliser set at 40 = 1760 x 990
• Stabiliser set at 50 = 1728 x 972

Cheers - Tony

Thanks, the grid could help.

If I tried to explain how I arrived at those calculations, it'd possibly cause more confusion - not my intent.

Maybe the attached image will help to explain...

To clarify about the snapshots. Yes - when you apply the stabiliser or crop to the video, the snaps come out at 1920x1080... BUT then (in graphics software) I overlaid each snapshot over the original (same frame) & resized it to match visually. From that I could calculate the approximate resolution of the cropped/stabilised video.

Hopefully that hasn't made it less clear than before.

Anyway - where's Jeff? Beside him, I'm not a mathematician's bootlace! If any mathematically inclined observer can point to a more effective way to do this, I'd welcome the advice.

Cheers - Tony
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Besides dividing the original clip number of pixels by the resulting clip number of pixels - in either direction - vertical or horizontal - this would give you the fraction - decimal fraction of what the relationship would be.

In the picture Tony supplied(Stabiliser Calc.png) either
A: 1823 or 1824 divided by 1920 horizontal
B: 1024 or 1026 divided by 1080

A: 0.949479166666(repeating 6) for 1823
0.95 for 1824

B: 0.948148148(repeating one forty eight)for 1024
0.95 for 1026

close enough for some/most engineering accounts.

So Stabilizer set to 20 provides the resulting clip at about about 95% of original clip?!

I know you can divide too Tony - I'm not a math wiz either but these are the numbers I get.

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You're not just a pretty face CS!

Over here, I refined the technique for calculating the cropped resolution by using a video with a grid overlay embedded. That made visual alignment easier & more accurate.

Following CS's lead of calculating the "cropping factor", it came down to a simple (and predictable) table. Please note that these are estimations only and cropping factors have been rounded to 2 decimal places.



During the process, it appeared that when "Enhance Stabiliser" is applied, "Rotational Camera Shake" is applied by default. Didn't know that

Cheers - Tony

Table also attached as PDF for reference.
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Now THOSE are a nice set of....errrm... tables!

(hehehee)

In all seriousness though - those are some nice tables to have to understand the approximate result from the stabilization process - on it's affect on the clip size. Thanks for doing all that work and sharing it!

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Yes. That is one way to keep those tables in mind. LOL

I was waiting to see what Tony would say but....tomasc... you've provided the anticipated response that I expected. lol....

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