Stabilization

Handheld footage shakes: the frame jitters left and right, tilts, rolls a little off level, and — with a lens that keeps re-focusing — quietly pumps in and out as its field of view changes (focus breathing). The Stabilization effect removes that shake. It analyses the clip to recover how the camera actually moved, works out a smoother path the footage should have followed, and warps each frame onto it.

Add it the same way as any other effect: select a video clip, choose Stabilization from the Effects menu (under Video), and adjust it in the Inspector. Analysis starts on its own the moment you apply it — you don’t have to press anything — and the clip keeps playing (unstabilised) while it works.

Note: Stabilization is for media clips — clips backed by a video file. It isn’t offered on adjustment layers or generated clips, which have no camera motion to track.

What’s in this guide

How analysis works
Start from a preset
Smoothing — Mode, Smoothness, and Strength
Per-channel control
Fixing focus breathing with Scale Lock
Framing — Auto Zoom and Cropping Ratio
Method — how much motion to model
The camera-path graph
Diagnostics and analysis options

How analysis works

Analysis runs in the background so it never blocks editing. While it’s working, a banner over the monitor shows the progress (“Analyzing 43%…”); when it finishes the effect takes hold on the next repaint. You can watch every running analysis, and cancel any of them, in View ▸ Background Tasks.

The result is cached per source clip in a per-user cache, not in the project file, so:

Re-opening the project, or copying the effect to a matching clip, reuses the analysis instead of redoing it.
Changing any smoothing control re-solves instantly — only the analysis (recovering the motion) is expensive, and it doesn’t depend on the smoothing settings. Tune freely.
Trimming a clip a little stays within the cached range; trimming well past it triggers a quick re-analysis, with the banner to tell you.

To analyse clips ahead of time — before you even apply the effect — select them in the media bin and choose Analyze for Stabilization. When you export, Sprocket checks for any stabilised clip that hasn’t been analysed yet and offers to analyze first or export as-is, so a corrected shot never slips out uncorrected by accident.

Because the correction is a deterministic function of the recovered motion and your settings, preview and export produce exactly the same frames.

Start from a preset

The preset picker at the top is the fastest way in:

Default — adaptive smoothing at a moderate strength; the everyday choice.
Gentle / Strong — less or more smoothing.
Camera Lock / Tripod — removes all camera movement, as if the shot were locked off on a tripod.
Handheld Look — smooths the jitter but keeps some of the original movement (Strength 60%), so the shot still feels handheld, just steadier.
Fix Focus Breathing Only — leaves pan, tilt, and rotation exactly as shot and removes only the scale pumping. See below.
Horizon Lock — holds the horizon level for the whole shot.

Presets set only the smoothing controls — they never touch Detailed Analysis, Show Track Points, or the banner toggle, which stay yours.

Smoothing — Mode, Smoothness, and Strength

Mode chooses how the camera path is smoothed:
- Smooth Camera (default) — adaptive, intent-preserving. It follows moves you clearly meant — a deliberate pan or push-in — while smoothing the jitter around them, so a panning shot doesn’t drag or rubber-band.
- Smooth Motion — a uniform smoothing of the whole path. Simpler and very even; can lag a fast deliberate move.
- Camera Lock — holds the camera completely still (tripod).
Smoothness is the master control: how much shake to iron out. Higher is steadier but needs more crop to hide the corrected edges (see Framing).
Strength blends between the original camera path (0%) and the fully smoothed one (100%). Drop it below 100% to keep some of the original motion — the Handheld Look preset is just Strength turned down.

Per-channel control

The Position Smoothing, Rotation Smoothing, and Scale Smoothing sliders scale how hard each kind of motion is smoothed, relative to the master Smoothness (1.0 = the master amount, 0 = leave that channel alone, up to 2×). Use them to, say, fully steady side-to-side jitter while leaving a slow intentional tilt mostly intact.

Fixing focus breathing with Scale Lock

Focus breathing is the frame gently zooming in and out as a lens re-focuses. It shows up as a scale wobble, and the Scale control is where you deal with it:

Smooth (default) — the scale channel is smoothed like the others (using Scale Smoothing).
Preserve — leave the scale exactly as shot (correct only pan/tilt/rotation).
Lock — remove all scale change relative to a reference, holding the field of view rock-steady. This is the focus-breathing fix.

When Scale is Lock, the Lock Reference picks which framing every frame is held to:

Tightest (default) — the most zoomed-in frame in the clip. Nothing ever scales below it, so no black edges appear from the scale correction.
Widest, First Frame, or Median — hold to the widest framing, the clip’s opening framing, or the middle of the range.

The Fix Focus Breathing Only preset sets Scale to Lock and zeroes the position and rotation smoothing, so it corrects the pumping and touches nothing else.

Note: Focus breathing also very slightly changes how the lens renders blur as it refocuses. Stabilization corrects the field of view (the visible zooming) — it can’t undo an optical blur change. In practice the FOV pump is what the eye notices, and locking it removes the distraction.

Framing — Auto Zoom and Cropping Ratio

When Sprocket smooths the path, the corrected frame no longer fills the output — its edges swing in and would show as black borders. Two controls decide what to do:

Auto Zoom (on by default) scales the picture up just enough to push those edges out of view. The amount used is shown as an Applied Zoom readout, so you can see how much resolution the stabilisation is costing.
Cropping Ratio is the budget for that zoom — the fraction of the frame that must survive (default 80%). Sprocket zooms only as far as the budget allows; if a shake is too big to hide within the budget, it eases off the smoothing on those frames rather than crop past your limit. Set it to 100% to forbid cropping entirely.

Turn Auto Zoom off to see the raw corrected frame with its moving transparent borders (the “stabilize only” view) — useful for judging how much the shot actually moved, or for compositing the borders yourself.

Method — how much motion to model

Method sets how rich a motion model the solve uses:

Translation — side-to-side and up-down shake only (2 degrees of freedom).
Similarity (default) — translation plus rotation and scale. The right choice for almost all handheld footage.
Perspective — adds perspective wobble (the kind of subtle keystoning you get from parallax or a lens tilt) on top of Similarity. Use it when a shot has distortion that Similarity can’t quite settle.

The camera-path graph

Below the controls, the Inspector draws the camera-path graph: the recovered Pan, Tilt, Zoom, and Rotation over the clip, showing the raw path (dim) against the smoothed one (accent), with a marker at the playhead. It’s the quickest way to see what the analysis found — and focus breathing is unmistakable here: it shows up as a ripple on the Zoom curve that the smoothed line flattens.

Diagnostics and analysis options

Detailed Analysis re-analyses at a higher resolution and with twice as many tracking points. It’s slower but steadier on difficult footage (low contrast, lots of fine motion). Turning it on re-runs the analysis (it’s a different cache entry).
Show Track Points overlays the features the analysis tracked on the monitor, so you can confirm it locked onto the scene and not, say, a moving subject. It’s a preview overlay only and never appears in the export.
Hide Warning Banner suppresses the on-monitor status/warning banner for this clip once you’ve seen it — for instance the “Low confidence on N frames” notice on a shot where part of the frame couldn’t be tracked reliably.

Effects & the effect stack — how to add, reorder, and remove effects; place Stabilization early in the stack (Sprocket puts it right after a Color Transform, or first).
Keyframing & animation — Smoothness and Strength keyframe, so you can ease stabilisation in or out over a shot.
Exporting your video — export picks up the same cached analysis, and offers to analyze any stabilised clip that isn’t ready yet.