Monday 19 June 2017

How do I align/stabilize images for a timelapse?


I've taken a picture of my yard every day for a while now, all from the same angle. I'd like to align them all and crop a bit off the edges so they are stable for a timelapse. Right now there are 450 of size 4000x3000.



I found some other questions about it (Easiest way to auto-align a stack of images? , What open source software for auto-alignment of photographs?) that point to hugin and align_image_stack.exe . That seemed promising, until I ran it and it was still going without any output for 3 days. It seems suited for panoramic stitching or focus stacking but not for extended timelapses.


I found some tutorials about aligning images in Photoshop, so I tried the Creative Cloud trial and found that loading the images in as layers and aligning an image stack worked really well for 20 images and made them line up perfectly. But took a ton of memory and ran for several days without results when I tried on my full set of images.


I also tried Premiere Pro and applied the Warp Stabilizer effect and specified "No motion" but it still moved around a bit.


Is there any Windows software that can do this? I am getting close to thinking I would have to custom-build it but it seems really likely to me that there's some tool out there that does it since there's so many people making time lapses. Anyone know of one?



Answer



My two cents.


1) Take a look at blender to stabilize video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU8zqn091rM


2) Do shorter pices of video at a time. Try for example doing sequences of 30-45 frames.


3) Use one frame as a reference to stabilize the rest. So you have a frame 1 on all the aditional sequences. You can remove this repeating frame after.


4) You now can merge the diferent sequences. There is a chance you need to re-crop the resulting footage after. You could use this repeated frame to see what offset you have from sequence to sequence.



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