These are a lot of fun to make. Quite easy when you have the right software, too.

I got the idea from Vincent-B who also shows the basic idea in this video.

He seems to use “Motion” in Final Cut Pro in OSX, while I used After Effects in Windows. There are other programs that stabalize motion in video (even the free VirtualDub has a stabalize plug-in) but the slightly more difficult part, as I see it, is being able to resize the video canvas and freely move the videos around. Unfortunately, this eliminates all the free video editors that I’m aware of.

I have a theory that the free motion tracking programs Voodoo and Icarus should work, but I haven’t had any experience with them (I only know of them via the Blender Artist forums).

Stabalized Video Panorama in After Effects

This is my method for making these video panoramas.

1. Shoot some video in the same way you would shoot a panorama with photo. Hand-held video gets the nice wobbly effect on the final video. So hold the camera and point it at each section of the scene for as long as you want the final video to be. Want a 30 second film? Each section of video should be 30 seconds long. Make sure there’s some over-lap in each section you’re filming.
2. Download the videos to your computer and import them into After Effects.
3. Drag and drop the videos into a new composition then resize the composition to an appropriately wide width. Mine have been around 1000-1400px, since the original videos are 320x240px.
4. Starting with the first video, right-click and choose “stabalize”. Make sure you tick “rotation” as well as motion.
5. Two little boxes should appear on the video, with smaller boxes inside them. These are the tracking points. The program will look at the pixels inside these boxes and use them as the reference for stabalizing the motion. So move those boxes to two places that aren’t obscured at all in the length of the video (otherwise the points will get upset and will stop tracking properly).
6. Now click the play button in the Stabalize pallette and it will analyze the video. If one of the points messes up, move it somewhere else and re-analyze.
7. Once you’re happy with it, press apply and the video should be stable. Doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect – that adds a bit of character to the video, I think.
8. Now go through and stabalize the rest of the videos in the same way.
9. Once that’s done, align the videos so that the overlapping parts line up reasonably well, and you’re done.
10. Once that was done, I added some curves to adjust the colours as I would in Photoshop and adjusted the video canvas size so it all fit properly.
11. All that’s left is to render the final video. I rendered to an Xvid AVI file, full size (about 1400x400px) and uploaded that straight to Flickr and Youtube.

That’s my method for now. I have more of these coming soon – I can’t get enough of them!