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DaVinci controls regarding stabilization are very limited, and there seems to be no documentation on how to achieve the following.

  • Given moderately shaky 100fps footage, one wants to
  • produce a 30fps timeline,
  • without slowing footage down (no slow-mo is needed for that bit), but
  • making the stabilizer use excess framerate to provide better stabilization.

An example of similar approach is various timelapse apps, shooting a normal framerate video and produce a very smooth sped-up outcome.

I have tried using stabilizer on the clip interpreted at 30fps and sped-up 300%, and on the same clip interpreted at 100fps without the speed-up. I have tried cranking up the Smooth parameter and turning off GPU acceleration. However, the outcome doesn’t seem to be improving, which makes me think the Resolve’s stabilizer is not designed to use excess framerate when it’s available.

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  • Maybe you actually want some hardware like this: store.dji.com/de/shop/handheld-gimbals (I know it's too late if the shots are made, but some recording mistakes are hard to fix post-production)
    – U. Windl
    Commented Jan 30 at 21:03
  • @U.Windl I agree that it’s best to stabilize during the shoot.
    – Anton Strogonoff
    Commented Jan 31 at 9:27

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The stabilizer doesn’t “care” about the fidelity of time it’s processing. It looks at the sequence as a whole, calculates the vector magnitude of pixel motion from one frame to the next, and then translates or warps (user choice) each frame in the opposite direction.

A 3000 FPS video looks the same to the stabilizer as a 30 FPS one.

HFR video is great at capturing temporal fidelity, but higher temporal fidelity of a shaky camera only gives you higher-frequency camera rotation noise.

To smooth out the noise, you actually want to blend the frames together. This is possible in Resolve by blending together nearby frames with motion blur, either through the motion tab of the color page, or as an edit effect. Last I checked, the color page couldn’t simulate greater than a 360 degree shutter, however.

But all of this happens naturally, in camera, when you use a lower frame rate and longer shutter speed. So in most cases, using HFR works against you.

You see the effect more commonly in time lapse videos because they are essentially the opposite of HFR ones, and high frequency rotational noise is naturally filtered out because each sample is spaced further apart temporally.

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  • HFR provides signal and noise, and excess frames could be used as input for stabilization. In the simplest case, if I shoot in 120fps and deliver in 30fps, point tracker can at least choose from four frames the one that deviates the least. I wonder if this is used by Instagram’s Hyperlapse, which doesn’t produce extremely shaky footage despite being ultimately the same case (stabilization + speed-up discarding excess frames).
    – Anton Strogonoff
    Commented May 15, 2022 at 9:50
  • BMD are very open to feature requests and recommendations posted on the feature request subforum of their website. I’ve personally made requests which were implemented in the next point release. In one simple case, it took them less than three weeks. It can’t hurt to ask. They won’t comment publicly, but simple, reasonable requests with community support usually receive prompt attention. Just watch the release notes.
    – Jason Conrad
    Commented May 15, 2022 at 10:20
  • I guess the answer is “no”, but the question I should’ve asked is “how to achieve this with some workaround or another”…
    – Anton Strogonoff
    Commented May 23, 2022 at 19:12

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