How to Remove Camera Shake in Premiere Pro
All videographers have been there. You roll up to set with all of your gear, film some epic scenes, and then get back to your computer to start editing, only to realize that your handheld shots are shaky and seemingly unusable. Yes, camera shake is a real bummer. And it can even be stressful if some of your video for a paid gig is shaky. But never fear, we’re going to show you how to remove camera shake in Premiere Pro!
Step 1: Drop your Shaky Footage onto the Timeline and Trim It
Dropping your clip onto the timeline before stabilizing it may seem obvious, but the key tip here is to make sure you trim it before you stabilize it. Why? Because Premiere Pro, when stabilizing your footage, analyzes the exact frames that you want to stabilize. If you stabilize your entire clip before you trim it, Premiere Pro may make your stabilized footage look a bit funky. This is because Premiere Pro tries to find the dominant movement in a clip, and stabilize the video around that. This means that, if your shaky video has all sorts of awkward movements that go left, right, up and / or down, Premiere Pro will try and make sense of all of these movements, which usually leads to a less stabilized clip.
The best move is to find a section of your clip that you think is workable / has one specific dominant movement, and then trim your clip to just that section. That will give Premiere Pro the best shot at removing the camera shake.
Step 2: Add Warp Stabilizer to Your Clip
To actually stabilize your clip, you need to add an effect called Warp Stabilizer to it. To do this, head to the effects panel, search for Warp Stabilizer, and then drag and drop it onto your clip. Premiere Pro will automatically start analyzing the clip to find the dominant movement to remove the camera shake. This process can take a bit of time depending on how long your clip is.
Note: If you make your clip longer after you’ve added Warp Stabilizer, you’ll need to have Premiere Pro analyze it again. To do this, you will need to head to the Effects Control panel, scroll down to Warp Stabilizer, and hit the analyze button.
Step 3: Adjust As Needed
Once Premiere Pro has finished analyzing your clip, watch it back and see how it turned out. You may find that the clip is perfect right from the start, or you may find that it needs a bit more (or, if your clip looks really distorted, a bit less) stabilization. If the clip doesn’t look quite right, Premiere Pro gives you some adjustment options to tweak your footage until it’s right:
Result
This allows you to choose whether your footage will retain the original camera footage in the clip, while making the movement smoother (Smooth Motion), or remove the motion all together (No Motion). We tend to utilize Smooth Motion more, as we like to maintain the intended motion we tried to create with our footage.
Smoothness
This determines how much of your footage get stabilized by Premiere Pro. Use less smoothness, and more of your original camera’s shakiness / movement will be present; use more smoothness, and less of your original camera’s shakiness / movement will be present. Got it?
Now, if this is an article about how to remove camera shake in Premiere Pro, you’re probably expecting me to say crank that smoothness all the way up to 100%! But, no. You want to be careful with how much smoothness you add to your clips, otherwise they can start to look very distorted. And I mean very distorted. The key is to find a nice balance where your clip looks stable, while also looking believable.
Premiere Pro starts by adding 50% smoothness. If your clip still looks super shaky at 50%, try going up by another 10-20%. If your clip at that point starts looking literally warped, you’ll know you’ve gone too far.
Method
The Method essentially determines how Premiere Pro will actually stabilize your footage. The default setting is subspace warp, which attempts to literally warp sections of your clip to make it look stable. This can be effective, however you do need to be careful, as it can quite literally make your clip looked warped.
Position uses position data to stabilize your clip, while Position, Scale and Rotation is basically an extension of that method. Note, if Position, Scale and Rotation data is not available, Premiere Pro will revert back to the Position method.
Lastly, Perspective essentially places “corner pins” on the clip in an attempt to stabilize it.
Preserve Scale
This attempts to keep the scale the same while stabilizing it. When you use some of the other methods, the clip can again get warped or even cropped, as Premiere Pro stabilizes the footage. Preserve Scale aims to eliminate that.
When adjusting the Warp Stabilizer effect, you need to spend some time getting comfortable with the different adjustment options, and visually see what each one of them does. Remember, the goal is to make your clip look as realistic as possible, and to also make it look like it wasn’t stabilized in post production.
So, if you’ve filmed some epic videos by hand, but are a bit disappointed by how shaky they look when reviewing them in post production, don’t worry. You now know how to remove camera shake in Premiere Pro, and you’ll be making all of your handheld footage super smooth in no time.
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