How to fix rolling shutter wobble in video

Rolling shutter wobble is fixed in Video by Zaweba with the Rolling shutter repair effect, which you apply from the Clip menu. It measures the movement in each frame and moves every row of the picture back by the right amount, straightening the lean and calming the jelly look. The readout setting defaults to 60 percent, top to bottom, and you can change both.

It runs on your own PC, it's free, and it works on footage from phones, action cameras and many mirrorless cameras, which are the usual suspects.

What rolling shutter actually is

Most small camera sensors don't capture the whole picture at once. They read it a row at a time, usually from the top down, so the bottom of the frame is recorded a fraction later than the top. When the camera or the subject moves quickly in that fraction, each row catches the scene at a slightly different moment.

The results are familiar once you know them. Buildings lean during a fast pan. A propeller turns into strange curved shapes. Footage from a vibrating mount wobbles like jelly. None of this is camera shake in the usual sense, which is why stabilising alone doesn't fix it.

How the repair works

The effect measures how the picture moves from frame to frame. Then it works out, for each row, how much later the sensor read that row compared with the first one, and moves the row back by the movement multiplied by that delay. Rows read later get moved further.

The readout setting tells the effect how long the sensor takes to read the frame, as a share of the frame time. It defaults to 60 percent, which is a sensible middle for many cameras. Direction can be top to bottom or bottom to top; most cameras read top to bottom, but if the correction makes things worse, try the other way, since a camera mounted upside down or a sensor that reads the other way needs it.

Step by step on a clip

Select the clip on the timeline and apply Rolling shutter repair from the Clip menu. Play a section with the strongest movement, such as the fastest part of a pan, and watch vertical lines like door frames, poles and building edges.

If verticals still lean the same way, the readout is probably too low; raise it. If they now lean the other way, it's too high; lower it. Small steps are best. You're aiming for upright edges during movement, not perfection on every frame.

Combining it with stabilising

Many wobbly clips have both problems: shake and rolling shutter. Fix the rolling shutter first, then stabilise. The stabiliser works better on a picture whose rows already agree with each other. In Video by Zaweba that means adding Rolling shutter repair and then either Clip > Stabilise for a quick steadied copy or the Stabiliser effect for adjustable smoothness and zoom.

Knowing the limits

Very fast vibration, such as a camera bolted to an engine, can produce wobble too quick and too complex for any row-shifting repair to remove completely. The effect still helps, but a softer mount next time helps more. Flash photography and strobing lights can also cause half-lit frames from the same sensor behaviour, and that's a different problem altogether.

For the ordinary cases, a quick pan from a phone or a bumpy walk, the repair gets buildings standing up straight again.