Stabilization of Timelapses

Hello,
I sometimes capture timelapses with my drone, without changing position. Because of wind and other factors the video bacomes a bit shaky. I tried to stabilize the video withe the function stabilize in the inspector, but it do not work very well. I have some points, eg. the earth surface as fix reference, can I use this for better stabilization? Is there a method for such thing?

Thanks,
Felix

Try either the older point stabiliser or the one in Fusion, it's really good.

Thanks! I searched a lot in the web, but I could not find a video or tutorial, how to use this point stabilizer.
Can you help me?

Regards,
Felix

Sorry for reposting, but can anyone help me? I still have not found a satisfying solution.

Thanks,
Felix

Did you apply a speed change to the clips?
if yes, try to create a compound clip for each clip and apply stabilization to compound clips,
this way the stabilizer will take into consideration the movement of the speeded up footage.

This tutorial may help. It shows the old stabilizer, now known as classic stabilizer found in the three dots menu in the stabilizer panel.

It's also a very good tutorial series in general. Even though it's for Resolve 12, the basics are mostly the same. You may recognize a familiar voice from the Resolve Color Grading tutorials at: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/produc ... e/training

Thanks.
I used the Tracker Mode under "Color" and clicked on stabilize, bute it does not work well, also when I use the camera lock. I think the problem is that it also uses the clouds in my footage, which are in motion. Does anyone have an ideas?

Thanks,
Felix

The point tracker should avoid that. Or you could use a mask to exclude the clouds.
I'd say it's time to learn Fusion.

It's also a very good tutorial series in general. Even though it's for Resolve 12, the basics are mostly the same. You may recognize a familiar voice from the Resolve Color Grading tutorials at: https://www.blackmagicdesign.com/produc ... e/training

I believe that is Daria Fissoun, a colorist from the UK and Europe who sometimes works for Blackmagic. She is excellent and does a terrific job with her tutorials.

I believe that is Daria Fissoun, a colorist from the UK and Europe who sometimes works for Blackmagic. She is excellent and does a terrific job with her tutorials.

Indeed, she's very clear and to the point!

I used the Tracker Mode under "Color" and clicked on stabilize, bute it does not work well, also when I use the camera lock. I think the problem is that it also uses the clouds in my footage, which are in motion. Does anyone have an ideas?

In the video that I linked, Daria shows how you can delete some of the tracker marks. That may help with the clouds. You may also want to read chapter 115 Motion Tracking Windows in the manual for how to use the point tracker which Uli mentioned. Or dive into Fusion for more control.

Can you post a still of a couple of your shots?
I have done a tutorial on stabilizing a horizon without recognizable points a couple of years ago.
The UI is different, but the method still applies

Thanks! Here ist a short example video (original data). I wanted to stabilize and speed it up 800x, but it didn't work. Maybe the material was too bad?

Regards,
Felix

The material is beautiful. Not much to track though, so that might have been part of the issue.
When looking at it it's hard to see any movement at all, I guess the shakiness appears when you speed up the video?

Usually when doing a stabilize I recommend stabilizing first and then speeding up, because it makes it easier for trackers to stay focused if the 'jumps' aren't too big, but since the movement is so subtle in this footage, maybe you're better off speeding up first and stabilizing later?

Thanks. Yes, the footage looks very smooth in "normal speed", but when I speed it up, it doesn't look good anymore.

Stabilization based on those small reflective puddles and a piece of well defined horizon line (on lefthand side there are specific patterns) should do the trick.

I just ripped the video from Youtube and played a bit with it, and I think I see the problem with stabilizing. It appears that there has been a bit of a rocking back and forth motion in the shot (which changes the tilting angle of the camera on the drone). Probably because of the wide angle lense this means that there is *a lot* of distortion in the shot compared to say a hand held shot on ground level where you'd want to compensate for the movement of the operator.

So I got a technically pretty stable shot, but this resulted in lots of visible warping in the rest of the frame.

I'm not sure if this is a good analogy, but here goes:

You could compare it by stabilizing a cape that's flapping in the wind, slightly towards you.
Say you hold the cape up by two points with two hands. You can stabilize the hands and the top line of the cape, so that part of the shot will become more stable but the distortion of the cape itself will only be made worse because of this.

If you want to truly stabilize this, you probably would have to do a camera track, extract the distortion, undistort the footage etc.

Syntheyes could probably get you a long way there, but then you come back to the original issue: there's just not much to track in the shot that's actually a fixed point, so getting a decent cameratrack won't be easy.

If there is perspective distortion from rotations (not just lens distortion), the only real way to properly solve it is to remove lens distortion, do a nodal pan camera track, project image onto sphere and do a new stabilized render off of that.

I just ripped the video from Youtube and played a bit with it, and I think I see the problem with stabilizing. It appears that there has been a bit of a rocking back and forth motion in the shot (which changes the tilting angle of the camera on the drone). Probably because of the wide angle lense this means that there is *a lot* of distortion in the shot compared to say a hand held shot on ground level where you'd want to compensate for the movement of the operator.

So I got a technically pretty stable shot, but this resulted in lots of visible warping in the rest of the frame.

I'm not sure if this is a good analogy, but here goes:

You could compare it by stabilizing a cape that's flapping in the wind, slightly towards you.
Say you hold the cape up by two points with two hands. You can stabilize the hands and the top line of the cape, so that part of the shot will become more stable but the distortion of the cape itself will only be made worse because of this.

If you want to truly stabilize this, you probably would have to do a camera track, extract the distortion, undistort the footage etc.

Syntheyes could probably get you a long way there, but then you come back to the original issue: there's just not much to track in the shot that's actually a fixed point, so getting a decent cameratrack won't be easy.

Thanks a lot for your time and your help!

If there is perspective distortion from rotations (not just lens distortion), the only real way to properly solve it is to remove lens distortion, do a nodal pan camera track, project image onto sphere and do a new stabilized render off of that.

Thank you! Sounds difficult.
So there is no easy way to avoid these problems already when shooting with the drone.

Well, easy is kind of relative. You can do a simple, maybe not so ideal solution or more elaborate, possibly visually better solution, or something inbetween. If simple stabilization which corrects for rotations and translation doesn’t give satisfying result, try some warp based stabilization. If that doesn’t work either, I’d personally do the technically correct setup which I described earlier, because there isn’t much more one can do in post (besides reprojection on actual scene geometry).

Felix, did you manage to stabilize your drone timelapse? I have the same problem. Link below.
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/527556379
I am not a DR expert but I've tried Stabilize in Edit, in Color and using Fusion to stabilize the combination of RAW images and could not get a satisfactory result. The best result, in the attached VIMEO video, was produced by the drone (DJI Mavic 2P) but it is just an mp4 and runs at 50FPS, not adjustable. DJI must use some clever stabilization equations, maybe using the drone IMU accelerations. But the video quality is inferior to the stills.
I have very clear points to stabilize but I find that the background can be very nicely stabilized simply in EDIT, but then the Oratory dome wobbles around like a jelly. I can stabilize the Oratory dome in Fusion but then the background warps like a wet flag in the wind.
I'm thinking that this maybe very challenging because the Oratory dome is large and with of perspective, moves relative to the background.

Ralph, the link isn't working for me. Did you type it correctly?

Sorry, it was a secure link. I'll try again here.
The little glitch was landing the drone & changing battery

I'm afraid there's not really a way to get a satisfactory result - depending on what you find satisfactory of course - but because of the wideangle lens the slight deviations in position result in a lot of deviation in the image. You see a lot of parallax in the shot that you won't be able to remove without reconstructing and reprojecting the scene in 3D (basically what Hendrik said before) and I don't really know how that works. But because the way the footage was shot it's - as you've surmised - a bit of an either/or situation when it comes to the 'default' stabilization options.

Thanks Sander.
I'm experimenting with Fusion and the Grid Warp. I seems to track the movement well and then feeding it through SphericalStabilizer and a transform it is improved but still not perfect. But not sure I'm doing the right thing. Are you aware of a good tutorial on using the GridWarp to stabilize?

what i don't understand is why you have to stabilize a timelapse?
if you can't get a stable image here, then you should think about the equipment you're using.





.

Incoming post read?
"I sometimes take time-lapse footage with my drone without changing position. The video gets a little shaky due to the wind and other factors."

DRONE, WIND ...

So what other devices should you use?
A bigger, much heavier drone (from 25 kg ...)
Or just wait until it is completely calm - you will have to wait a long time in many areas ...

sorry, also use different drones, but timelaps in a windy condition is a nogo

I'm afraid there's not really a way to get a satisfactory result - depending on what you find satisfactory of course - but because of the wideangle lens the slight deviations in position result in a lot of deviation in the image. You see a lot of parallax in the shot that you won't be able to remove without reconstructing and reprojecting the scene in 3D (basically what Hendrik said before) and I don't really know how that works. But because the way the footage was shot it's - as you've surmised - a bit of an either/or situation when it comes to the 'default' stabilization options.

This shot is very hard to stabilize even with projections because of the small detail like trees. One reasonable way I could think of is to find a set of frames where drone position kind of matches and do a frame blend based retime from these source frames. Another one would be full 3d camera track, dense point cloud, mesh it, project image on top and render through stabilized cam, but I'm not sure how well this would work due to these small details that move relative to each other. Tree branches are too small to create geometry from so bg shifting behind them will be visible anyway.

Time lapse with a drone will always be a problem, because even if there is apparently no wind (is that even at a height of 100m ?!) the drone can still drift slightly ... So the location changes and you become very special see at time lapse.
I could imagine that an improvement could be achieved if instead of stabilizing a fixed point with a tracker in the center of the image, if possible. But that's just an idea - I've never tried this myself.

I am now spinning a thought ... Looking for a platform that can hardly be reached normally, but that acts as a landing pad for the drone and from where there is the desired view. Land the drone there and take the time-lapse recording. With that you would definitely have a fixed location ...

Now that's an interesting thought!

Apart from that, the Stabilizer works pretty well if you are 'parked' in the air high enough and far enough from objects in the frame, so that perspective shifts are minimised. But in many cases that would make it a pretty boring picture.