Two sections in a video layer’s inspector analyse the movement of the camera that shot the footage, and they answer opposite questions. Camera Tracking recovers the camera so you can put new objects into the scene. Stabilize takes the shake out of the shot. They sit next to each other — Stabilize directly after Camera Tracking — but they do not share a solve, and neither one changes the other’s result.
Camera Tracking
Tracking analyses the footage, finds features that hold across frames, and works out how they moved. What you do with that motion is the interesting part.
Solve the shot
Open CAMERA TRACKING on a video layer and run the solve. The cog in the title row holds the solve options — analysis width, point count, detection grid, quality, LK window and the rest — read when a solve starts, so they apply to the next one.
The solve detects shot boundaries between consecutive frames, so a layer holding two takes no longer chains one take’s points into the next. A hard shake is left alone; a real cut re-seeds through the held pose.
Create Camera
Create camera works out where the camera actually travelled in space and writes it as a camera layer with keyframes on all six channels. This is the After Effects flow: place a layer in the scene afterwards and it sits at a depth and holds there, with the parallax that implies, because the camera is what moves.
The tracked camera goes onto the project’s camera channel, so its panel reads Camera / Movement / Depth of Field / Camera Keyframes like any other camera. Footage with no parallax is refused with the reason rather than solved badly, and frames that cannot be trusted are interpolated rather than emitted.
Points, nulls and layers
Select points in the solved cloud and you can:
- Create null — drops an invisible null at the points’ solved 3D position. It has no motion track on it at all, which is the point: it never moves, and it stays put in the shot anyway.
- Attach to a layer — a dropdown listing every layer sharing the timeline with the footage. The layer starts riding the motion you selected, keeping its own position, so where it sits at the reference frame is the offset. The result is an ordinary motion link, which you can retune or switch to Pin in that layer’s own Motion Tracking section.
Camera Tracking deliberately does not stabilise. Correcting the frame — holding a tracked point still, smoothing a wobble — is what Stabilize is for; recovering the camera that shot the plate is what tracking is for.
Stabilize
STABILIZE is a real warp stabilizer, and an independent effect: it measures adjacent decoded frames on its own and warps only this video’s source pixels. It never creates a camera, changes camera motion, adds a motion-tracking track or attaches a layer to one.
How it works
One click analyses the shot. Adjacent frames are measured with grid-balanced optical flow, a robust similarity solve turns that into a camera path, the path is smoothed, and the difference between the real path and the smoothed one becomes a per-frame warp of the decoded source image. The warp is applied while sampling the video texture, before the layer’s own transform, effects and transitions — so a stabilised layer still moves, scales and cuts exactly as you authored it.
Analysis runs on the original file rather than the proxy. A proxy is re-timed to a fixed frame rate with duplicated frames, which puts corrections half a frame off. It falls back to the proxy only when the original is far larger than the analysis width.
Like the tracker, it detects cuts and smooths each shot on its own — the panel says how many shots it found — and the shake read-out does not count the step across a cut as shake.
Controls
Every control re-tunes live from the camera path already stored, so changing one does not re-analyse.
- Path window — how many frames the smoothing looks across. Wider is smoother and needs more crop.
- Correction — how much of the measured shake is removed.
- Max crop — the ceiling on how far the frame may be zoomed to hide the edges the correction drags into view.
- Bound the crop — bends the smoothed path where the crop cap would otherwise expose an edge, instead of letting an edge show.
- Position, Rotation and Scale — which channels are corrected. Position and rotation are on by default; scale is off.
Behind the settings button are the analysis controls — frame rate, analysis width, feature budget, robust flow gate and centre-subject guard.
What the panel reports
After a run the panel reports Jitter removed, Static crop, Track support and Parallax residual, plus whether the grid-balanced path is coherent. A high parallax residual means the shot has real depth movement that a 2D similarity warp cannot fully correct — that is the case for Camera Tracking, not for stabilisation.
The solved warp is frame-synchronised in paused preview, playback, transitions and export, so what you scrub is what renders.
Where to go next
- Camera Layer — the camera a solve writes, and the 3D world view
- 3D Model Layers — objects to place in a tracked scene
- Scene Rig
- Layer Effects
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