Blackmagic Forum

I often shoot hand held and have wobbly horizon. Can I somehow track it and automatically correct with davinci stabilizer? I can do it manually with keyframing but it is a PITA.

The stabilizer should do a decent job. I find that translation or similarity often works better than perspective in such cases -- the latter giving a kind of wavy distortion when correcting some footage.

If you have no tilt or pan in the shot then try the Resolve stabiliser with the “camera lock” option checked. This works really well with fixed handheld shots. It’s almost like using a tripod.

You will have to try the various stabilization modes to determine which one introduces the fewest number of artifacts in the image. I find sometimes the Classic Stabilizer works best (with Point Tracker), but the new tracker has surprised me on occasion and did a fine job right out of the box... sometimes. It does require trial & error to determine which will work best -- it is not a purely automatic function.

I just finished a 100-minute documentary feature last week, and one trick I had to resort to is, we occasionally had a series of long shots (say, 1 or 2-minutes) of continuous footage, and we sometimes had to break them down into shorter clips and just stabilize the short clips, because there isn't much you can do with a frantically moving camera going through a crowd or something. Once it stops on a person's face for an interview, then you can stabilize it, and if you do it carefully, you can make the transition imperceptible.

I still wish there were a mode to select a horizon and prioritize is to be as leveled as possible.

Well, one can always wish, but for now you could rotate the image after stabilization.

In the DR Manual Chapter 65 on the Tracker Node is a section "Steady Angle". Perhaps you can set a tracker on a horizon feature and use its output to adjust just the angle of the footage. As I've never done this, you'll have to investigate further for yourself if interested.

Daniel Rivers wrote:I still wish there were a mode to select a horizon and prioritize is to be as leveled as possible.

I do that by eye, just in the belief that this is part of our job.

Uli Plank wrote:Well, one can always wish, but for now you could rotate the image after stabilization.

That is also a very good suggestion. A lot of this boils down to creative choice and a subjective opinion, neither of which can be done by software. (Yet.)