Video Stabilization: Smooth Out Shaky Footage

Not with zero loss: stabilization shifts every frame and rebuilds the video. The loss can be kept small: the resolution stays the same as the source, High quality encodes with bitrate to spare, and Full frame does not zoom the picture at all — the edges are filled in from neighboring frames instead of being cropped.

To cancel the jitter, each frame is shifted against the jolt, which exposes empty space at the edges. By default a slight zoom covers it — that zoom is the crop, and its percentage is shown before you download. Gentle spends no more than 5% of the frame; Full frame does not zoom at all.

Regular stabilization keeps the intended movement — a walk, a pan, a fly-by — and removes only the jitter. Tripod holds the camera in place for the whole clip: it is meant for handheld shots where the camera was not supposed to move. If the camera wandered far during the clip, holding it perfectly still takes a large crop — the tool tells you exactly how much.

No. Stabilization removes the movement of the frame as a whole, while blur from a long exposure and the jello caused by a phone sensor reading line by line stay inside the frame itself — this processing does not fix them.

That happens in two cases. The video is already steady — touching it would only cost you the edges, and the tool says so. Or unrelated motion covers almost the entire frame — a fence, branches, heavy rain, a crowd right in front of the lens: there is nothing to measure the camera shake against, and it is more honest to leave the recording alone than to return a result worse than the original.

An AAC audio track is carried into MP4 and MKV without re-encoding — stabilization only changes the picture. For WebM the audio is re-encoded to Opus, because that format accepts nothing else.