Stabilize shaky footage

What Eddie can do

Eddie can stabilize shaky footage — drone shots, gimbal-less handheld, walking shots — right in the edit. Ask for it in plain language: "stabilize this clip," "this shot is too shaky," "smooth out the drone footage," or "steady this handheld bit," and Eddie flags the clip and generates a steadied rendition.

How it works

Eddie runs a two-pass stabilization analysis (detect the shake, then smooth and re-encode) over the clip's whole source file — not just the segment you flagged. That means:

• The pass only has to run once per source file. Flagging another segment from the same clip, or using the clip in a different edit, reuses the same steadied rendition for free and instantly.
• It's scoped to the edit you're working in and fully reversible — ask Eddie to un-stabilize a clip and it reverts to the original footage, also free.
• The first request for a given source is asynchronous: Eddie kicks off a cloud render that usually finishes in a minute or two. The steadied footage appears automatically in the player and bakes into MP4 renders and every NLE export (Premiere Pro, Final Cut Pro, DaVinci Resolve, Avid EDL, OTIO) once it's ready — no extra step needed on your end.

The tradeoff

Steadying the frame means hiding the shake at the edges, so a stabilized clip is cropped in slightly — roughly 5–15%, depending on how much correction it needed. That's a good trade for genuinely shaky footage, but it's an unnecessary crop with no real benefit on already-steady or tripod shots — ask for it only where the shake is real.

Cost

Generating a new stabilized rendition costs 12 credits per minute of the source clip's length (about $0.12/minute), with a minimum of 1 second billed. You're charged once per source file, up front, and it's automatically refunded if the render fails. Reusing an already-stabilized source on another segment or edit is free, and so is un-stabilizing.

If your workspace doesn't have enough credits, the flag is still set on the segment but the rendition isn't generated until you buy more credits and ask Eddie again.

If a clip can't be stabilized

Occasionally a source doesn't have a cloud-hosted file to run the stabilization pass on yet — for example, it's still uploading or transcoding. Eddie will tell you when that's the case rather than fail silently; try again once the clip has finished importing.

Related

For clips that need reframing rather than de-shaking, see Crop and reframe. For the automatic camera movement Eddie adds by default — separate from stabilization — see Cinematic motion: the automatic push, drift and zoom.