Tracking box to full viewport

Question

Basically, I've recorded a video of gameplay on my DS console using a camcorder, and I want to:

1. Remove the shaky movement caused by me not having a tripod
2. Stretch the screen to cover the entire viewport.

I'm a complete newbie at video editing, but I've got Adobe After Effects so I figured I'd give it a try. My video is imported and thanks to a tutorial I have it happily tracking the corners of the screen. Now what I need to know is how can I expand that area to fill the viewport?

Any tutorials or other step-by-step instructions would be much appreciated!

EDIT: Motion tracking isn't quite working the way I'd hoped... If it helps any, the console is black so the video is essentially just the screen surrounded by near-black area. Any idea how to track that?

Answer 1

Tracking the corners of the screen isn't the same as stabilising the image. Whatever you do, the stabilisation is going to reduce the overall resolution of the video, as it is going to have to scale up to fill the viewport with the cropped stabilised image.

Here's a YouTube tutorial showing how to use image stabilisation in AE:

LockNLoad is a plugin that can help with stabilisation, but it will still make the image look softer.

Alternatively Final Cut has stabilisation built in too. The best option would be to reshoot with the camera on a firm surface, and avoid the wobbles in the first place.