Handheld camera work is very common today, but if you’re out there shooting your own movies, sometimes you may find your footage has a high frequency shake that is just really annoying. I’ve found that the smaller the camera is, the more chance there is of introducing that jittery motion. With people shooting movies on smartphones and GoPros, cameras really can’t get much smaller! That means there is a lot of high frequency jitter in those handheld shots.
As usual, someone in the Blender community created a great add-on to help solve this problem. It’s called Highpass, and it’s created by Björn Sonnenschein (sunboy at blenderartists.org). You can read his own post about it on his blog here, or check out the blenderartist post here. It’s extremely easy to use, just check out the video below to see how it works.
Keep in mind that if your track doesn’t run the full length of the shot, it will fail and give you an error message. That can limit the usefulness of this particular add-on, but in some upcoming posts, I’ll show you a few more options for stabilizing and smoothing other types of footage, such as footage where the markers go off-screen.
Try the add-on out and share links to your smoothed clips in the comments!
Click HERE to download the Highpass add-on.
Assets required:
- Lockheed Park footage
- Antique Store footage
- Sidewalk Biking footage
Before & After comparison: