stabilize 4K shaky video and crop/output as HD

Hey all,

So I have some 4K video that I hand held recorded and its naturally a bit shaky. In Resolve 15 beta 2, I used the color tab, stabilize feature, and as I wanted it to appear as if it was on a tripod (e.g. no rotation or zoom in the original video was done), I chose the Camera Look checkbox. However, after stabilizing it.. the video DID look very stable, but naturally to achieve that it moves the video around a bit such that I see black borders mostly on right/bottom side, but sometimes left/top as well. I understand HOW and WHY this happens.. and I am OK with it.

The issue for me is.. I would like to "crop" all that out and spit this out to an HD video. When I drag/drop the video on to the timeline, it changes the timeline to a 4K one. Fine. But in order to achieve a stabilized HD output, do I need to create an HD timeline, then work with the 4K video source.. will that correctly still stabilize the footage but in an HD timeline, it would NOT see any of the black borders as the frames move around?

In other words, I want to use the extra resolution of 4K to give me great stabilized HD footage. I achieve this by zooming in the footage a bit.. but I am worried this approach degrades/pixelates the video a bit as it is in a 4K timeline. I cant switch it to an HD timeline either as the project is already saved. Now that 15 supports multiple timelines/tabbed timelines.. is it possible to just create a 2nd HD timeline and put the stabilized footage on that and it all magically works.. or something else I gotta do?

Hope this isnt too confusing.. not sure how best to describe it.

You could create a HD Timeline with no resizing of the input which gives you a lot of room to stabilize without showing those ugly black areas.

If you’re confident that all the ugly bits are outside the area of a HD frame, then you will get the same result in the Delivery tab by defining your deliverables as HD centered in the frame.

Sometimes you can adjust the parameters in the Stabilize function in a way that allows some movement and thus avoid the ugly parts.

You can also turn on Stabilize Zoom to have the good stuff upscale to remove the ugly stuff from your frame.

Play with it and you’ll get where you want to go.


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That is good to know. I was curious how that works. Thank you for the info.

As Rick said, if the shacking is not heavy then by turning the zoom on you will get very pleasant results. I even find the stabilization in 14 cinematic