Why isn't the Stabilizer improving my shaky video? (iOS)

The Lock & Load Stabilizer is a very sophisticated tool designed to stabilize your video clips, but you may find that some clips stabilize better than others.

For example, if you shoot handheld video walking on a trail in the mountains. The camera movement is all over the place, moving up and down, side to side, and forward (the z-Axis). When you apply Lock & Load, the video may not stabilize to the extent that you wanted. This would not be entirely unexpected. Stabilization will work best on clips where the camera position—even if unsteady—is more or less fixed relative to the frame.

Lock & Load does its job by tracking different points in the frame and performing complex counter-movements to the footage. This means your frames might rotate, raise or lower, slide left or right and scale. If you apply stabilization and the result is good, you’re done with stabilization. If you see things that aren’t quite right, you can manually adjust these settings in the Stabilizer window:

• Overall Strength: This is the main parameter and lets you control the strength of stabilization for all directions at once. The lowest value zero means no stabilization; the max value corresponds to maximum stabilization or smoothing effect.
• Advanced Strength: There are separate sliders for “Horizontal”, “Vertical”, “Rotation” and “Zoom”. By default, all directions except for Zoom (or motion in z-Axis) are enabled, and you will rarely need to change this.
• Advanced Scale: In order to smooth the motion, Lock & Load needs to scale and reposition the source footage which of course leads to black on the edges of the image. The normal method of correcting this is to scale the image slightly, depending on the amount of motion at that time.
• Advanced Margin: Depending how you have scaling set, these controls enable you to configure what is visible outside the corrected area of the shot.
• Automatic Shutter Correction: Turn on shutter reduction manually with the toggle, no other steps are needed. The clip is analysed for rolling shutter strength and then rolling shutter reduction is automatically applied, just play your clip to preview the results.

For more information, we recommend viewing our video tutorial on the Stabilizer here.