Stab?!?

No, we’re not talking about stabbing!

No actual stabbing here - what we’re doing is stabilizing our footage.

Not stabbing, stabilization!

There are many reasons your camera might be a little wobbly - wind, moving the camera, something colliding with your tripod.

Stabilization allows us to make sure that our video won’t make people feel ill by moving around too much.

Autopano Video will attempt to calculate the movement of the camera and stabilize it. But, before we perform this analysis and correction, we should first manually align the horizon.

Horizon Correction

Unless you are very lucky, you’ll need to manually correct the horizon in your stitched footage. This is easy! Just click and drag vertically in the Realtime Preview window until the horizon begins to look correct. See the image below.

Click and drag vertically to align the horizon. Click and drag horizontally to set the horizontal center.

You should note that the vertical alignment depends on where you start dragging with your mouse. Think of it like smudging the image around until the horizon looks correct.

If you want to be precise, you can click the grid button to help with your alignment.

Turn on the grid for a more accurate horizon alignment.

When you are happy with your horizon adjustments, be sure to click the Apply button to commit your changes!

Be sure to Apply your changes!

Stabilization

Once your horizon is adjusted, just click Compute motion

The default stabilization settings are fine. If you turn down the Compensation Level slider then video will be shakier. You may want that for a really jarring experience. But, most of the time, you should leave it at 100% stabilization.

The Rolling Shutter option only applies if you are using a Go Pro Omni. You can check that box to try to compensate for rolling shutter artifacts. Rolling shutter is the term which describes how most digital cameras work - rather than exposing one frame of film in it’s entirety simultaneously, the picture is taken by scanning the scene rapidly, but not simultaneously. With rapidly moving objects this can sometimes cause weird artifacts and effects. This check box attempts to fix that problem for the Go Pro Omni.

Chose the compute motion button, and then wait for the film to be processed. Depending on the length of footage, this can take a little while. Be patient!