How to stabilise shaky video for free

Shaky footage can be steadied for free in Video by Zaweba in two ways. Clip > Stabilise makes a steadied copy of the clip in one go, and the Stabiliser effect analyses the shake and lets you adjust smoothness, zoom and how the edges are handled. Both work offline on your own PC, and neither changes your original file.

Which to use depends on how much control you want. The menu command is a quick fix. The effect is for shots that matter, where you want to decide how steady is steady enough.

The quick fix: Clip > Stabilise

Select the shaky clip on the timeline and choose Clip > Stabilise. Video by Zaweba runs FFmpeg's deshake on it and stores the steadied version in the stabilised folder, then uses that copy in your edit. The original stays untouched, so if you change your mind you've lost nothing.

This suits holiday clips, phone footage of a walk or a quick shot of a crowd. There are no settings to think about. Play the result, and if it's good enough, move on.

More control: the Stabiliser effect

For finer work, add the Stabiliser effect to the clip from the Effects tab. It analyses the shake, keys the corrections and gives you three things to adjust.

Smoothness sets how much movement is treated as shake. Low smoothness takes out the jitter but keeps your deliberate pans and walks. High smoothness tries to make the camera look locked off, which is lovely on a shot meant to be still and odd on one that was meant to move.

Zoom deals with the cost of stabilising. To hold the picture steady the frame has to move against the shake, which shows empty edges. Zooming in slightly hides them, at the price of a little sharpness and a tighter frame. Edge handling offers other ways to deal with those borders if you'd rather not zoom.

There's also a perspective mode, which corrects each corner of the frame separately. That's for shake that tilts the picture in depth, such as footage from a moving vehicle or a camera held at arm's length while walking, where a flat shift can't follow the wobble.

Settings that look natural

Trim before you stabilise. A clip that starts with you lifting the camera and ends with you lowering it gives the analysis big movements to fight. Cut those off first and the middle stabilises far better.

Use the least smoothing and zoom that looks right. Over-stabilised footage can take on a floating, seasick quality, especially with people walking through the frame. Compare with the effect on and off, and pull the smoothness back until the shot feels natural rather than perfectly still.

Watch for a second kind of wobble. Phone footage panned quickly can show a jelly-like lean, which is rolling shutter rather than shake. Stabilising won't fix that; the Rolling shutter repair effect in the Clip menu is made for it.

When stabilising can't help

Motion blur baked into each frame stays, even when the frame stops moving, so a very shaky shot in low light may look steady but smeary. In that case a short, well-chosen section of the shot often beats the whole thing. Stabilising is a rescue, not a replacement for a steady hand, but it rescues a lot.