Table of Contents

In this short tutorial you will learn how to use ffmpeg and the vidstab library to stabilize a video in two simple commands.

The stabilizing process has two steps: analizing and processing.

Analize the video

ffmpeg -i <input file> -vf vidstabdetect -f null <temp file>
  • <temp file> is where the information about the video is saved for the next step. You can name it whatever you want (it’s usually called ‘transforms.trf’).
  • More parameters.

Process the video

ffmpeg -i <input file> -vf vidstabtransform=smoothing=5:input=<temp file> <output file>
  • smoothing: Set the number of frames (value*2 + 1) used for lowpass filtering the camera movements. Default value is 10.
  • input is optional if you use transforms.trf.
  • More parameters.

Example (script)

#!/bin/bash

INPUT=$1
OUTPUT=$2
TEMP="transforms.trf"

ffmpeg -i $INPUT -vf vidstabdetect -f null $TEMP
ffmpeg -i $INPUT -vf vidstabtransform=smoothing=5:input=$TEMP $OUTPUT

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