this blog is not an indepth tutorial but it will show you a first attempt using the new warp stabilizer that comes out with the new version of after effects CS5.5. i also show you that the warp stabilizer will save you so much of your time. in the video below you see a stop motion / timelapse sequence we´ve shot in winter last year. my thoughts to shoot this shot were how good can i stabilize a handheld stop motion sequence with after effects and mocha.

at first – this first try without the warp stabilizer cost me 2 hole days for the stabilizing process.

first i´ve tried it with mocha. but mocha was NOT able to handle this extreme shaky footage. after this i jumped over to after effects where i´ve spend the most of the time for a frame by frame prestabilization by hand so that mocha could handle it. after this prestabilization i´ve renderd it out as a new jpeg sequence and imported it back into mocha for the “second pass” tracking. this time mocha made a good job. i´ve copied the tracking data back to after effects and the shot was stablized. not perfect stable but ways better as the original sequence. the skulpture was smooth but the background was bad and shaky cause of the large perspective changes that cames from the handheld shoot. at this time there was no way to fixed that.

now the jump to the new AWESOME warp stabilizer.

at the time i´ve first heard about the new plugin and saw some first previews on this – my first thoughts were … WoW this is the solution for stabilizing stop motion shots ! …
after the tryout version of the adobe cs 5.5 software came out i downloaded it to make some test with the stabilizer. i´ve imported my sequence and applied the warp stabilizer on it. the first instance of the stablilizer was to stablize only the movement of the position, scale and rotation with a crop but with no rescale to keep the image quallity. i´ve precomposed the shot and resized the comp with the new dimentions of the shot after the crop. on this i applied a new warp stabilizer and this time i´ve stabilized the perspective also with crop but no rescale. again precomposing and rescaling the comp to the new dimensions. then i applied a third warp stabilizer on this new comp and did it again. this time with the subspace stabilization. and because the subspace stabilisation doing the job by warping and repositioning the frame and pixels, at this time the background was also stablized as much as it could and the overall look was much smoother as on the stabilizations without the new warp stabilizer. and now hold on …. it only takes me under 2 HOUR´s of my lifetime to track and stabilize this shot.

Adobe CS5.5 Warp Stabilizer stop motion Example from Maik Thomas on Vimeo.

yep – i´m realy impressed about what you can do with this awesome new plugin.

if you have any questions. use the comment field below or write me an email and i will answer as soon i can.

How to build an fader ND Filter on a Fisheye Lens. ( German ) from Maik Thomas on Vimeo.

this is a little tutorial video that show you a technique to build a filter on your fisheye lens. in this video i use the tokina 10-17mm fisheye lens. i´m speaking german. but i think that all of you who not speak german, you will understand what i want to show you if you see the pictures. i hope

this is a technique you can use with all similar lenses and filters. hope i could help somebody.

DFocus Pro Lens Gear / Canon 50mm f/1.8 II

in this short tutorial i will show you how you can easily set up your DFocus Pro Lens Gear on the little nice and cheap Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens.
it is tricky to do the lense gear on this thin focus ring. but there is a simple solution to fix that.

DFocus Pro Lens Gear setup on the Canon 50mm f/1.8 II lens from Maik Thomas on Vimeo.

Canon 50mm f1/.8 II + Follow Focus

In this short Tutorial i will show you how to simply and fast preview your 720p 50 or 60 fps shots in slow motion from your Canon 7D or other file based cameras they capture video on this framerates without any transcoding or playback in your editing software. There is a simple method within the VLC-Player. You can download the VLC player for free from videolan.org – simply download and install the player. I think it´s one of the best player for video playback out there and it´s for FREE.

Start the VLC player and open your 720p footage clip.

Then go to playback in the top menue and click on “slower (fine)” in the dropdown menue.

You will see in the right corner of your video window the info of how times playback the video slower.

Make these steps as long to 0.50x (means half speed playback). That´s it. It´s an realy cool little feature that i use often to preview my high framerate footage in slow motion.

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update:

there are also 2 buttons on the left and right side of the timeslider below the video for a quick access of the speed value.

Hab mich mal dazu entschieden mich auch mal an ein Tutorial zu wagen. Wobei es eher ne art User-Guide-Tutorial geworden ist. Der erste Anlauf also der war stimmlich ein “no go”. beim 2ten hats den Ton nicht aufgezeichnet. Und das war der bei dem die Aufzeichnung gefühlt am besten verlief. Nuja der dritte ist es dann geworden. Wie auch immer.
Das Projektfile gibt’s hier zum Download und kann frei verwendet werden. Die Projektdatei Funktioniert ab After Effects CS4.
In dem Projektfile geht es um ein stereoskopisches Kamerasetup in After Effects. Die Art und Weise und Nutzung des Inhalts der Datei beschreibe ich im Video.
Nützliches hintergrundwissen und Technischen Krams rund um Stereo 3D gibt es bei www.perspektrum.de oder natürlich auch bei www.stereoskopie.org – der Deutschen Gesellschaft für Stereoskopie e.V.

After Effects CS4 Stereocam Setup Guide from Maik Thomas on Vimeo.