Hyperlapse Workflow

Hi there and welcome to my first ever blog post! By popular demand on Instagram, I will give you an insight on how I use Adobe After Effects to stabilize my Hyperlapse videos.

This workflow is my most basic one, which I use in most cases and which works perfectly for the way I shoot. Please keep in mind, stabilizing is only one part of creating smooth Hyperlapse videos. Shooting the Hyperlapse and creating the video file is also a very important part, which will be covered in a future blog. So even if you follow my workflow step by step with your own Hyperlapse, your results may vary. If you have feedback after reading make sure to leave a comment or send a message, also if you have any topics you would like to read about in the future!

What you need

For this workflow tutorial you will need a Hyperlapse video file and Adobe After Effects. If you only have an image sequence yet, just import the image sequence into your workspace, right click and select “create proxy” or hit “CTRL+M” to create a ProRes video file. Once finished you are ready to stabilize! That´s how my unstabilized video looks like:

Step 1: Unstabilized Hyperlapse

Point Tracker

The first step is adding a single point tracker. Navigate to the “Tracker” window on the top right of your Screen and klick “Stabilize Motion”

While shooting your Hyperlapse you picked an anchor point in your frame which stayed at the same position throughout the shot. Take the point tracker and place it on this anchor point. In my example I picked the cross of the quadriga on top of the Brandenburg Gate. Adjust the size of the point tracker and its search region according to the feature you picked. A good rule which works great for me is to have a search region which is double the size of the actual feature region.

Step 2: Adding a point tracker

Keep in mind, the bigger you scale the point tracker, the slower it will analyze your clip. Hit “Analyze” to let the tracker do its magic and once at the end of your clip click on “Apply”.

Checking for mistakes

Now I usually watch the clip a couple of times to check if the point tracker did miss the target or if there are any blurry or double frames. In case you find any wrong frames, make sure to delete them for better results.

Masking

I usually shoot with a wide-angle lens at focal lengths between 16mm to 20mm, that’s why masking is needed to reduce editing time and give smoother results. To open the mask tool, hit Q on your keyboard. For those wide-angle shots, I like to mask out the outer parts of the image, as well as the ground in front of the camera as they shift the most and might confuse the Warp Stabilizer later.

Step 3: Masking and creating a new composition

Creating a new composition

Because the Warp Stabilizer will ignore masks you need to create a new composition from the active composition. To do so, go to your project panel and drag and drop the composition on the “Create new composition” button.

Warp Stabilizer 1

Now the magic will happen. In the tracker window click “Warp Stabilizer” to apply the effect to your active clip. If you check the settings panel you will find some options, you can change for different results.

I always change the method to perspective and the smoothness to a value between 5% and 15% like shown below. For better results choose low values and apply the Warp Stabilizer a second time. In most cases this method works better compared to setting the smoothness to high values

Now, wait until the Warp Stabilizer finishes analyzing and stabilising your clip. Depending on your computer this can take some time, so go and grab a coffee or watch my latest YouTube video in case you missed it.

Step 4: Warp Stabilizer and settings

Warp Stabilizer 2

After adding the Warp Stabilizer the first time, the clip already looks pretty smooth. But after checking in full screen mode and full resolution there were still some little shakes. So once again I created a new composition from the active one and added the Warp Stabilizer a second time with the same settings.

Cleaning

So far, the video looks smooth! The last step before exporting is to clean the video as good as possible. To reduce noise I use the "ReduceNoise" plug in by Neat Video. Another great After Effects Plug In is “FlickerFree”, which reduces any flickering in your shot.

For the shot of the Brandenburg Gate there was not much to clean so I added the two Plug-ins as well as some sharpening. The final results looks like this:

Step 5: Final result

Exporting

Before exporting I reframe the file to my need by changing the composition settings (“CTRL+K”) and resizing the video. Now I add the file to the render que (“CTRL+M”) choose the Apple ProRes format, a suitable file name and folder and hit render!

Final words

Like mentioned in the beginning, this is just an insight into my workflow and not the magic solution to stabilize any Hyperlapse. As your shooting method might be completely different to mine, this workflow might produce different results. So make sure to test things out and shoot as clean as possible.

If you have any other topics you would like to read about, please leave a comment or send a message over @Instagram