How to stabilise a shaky video after it is recorded

How does video stabilisation work?

In three steps, whichever app does it:

Track the movement. The software follows details across the frame from one picture to the next, and works out how the camera moved: sideways, up and down, and in some apps turning and leaning.
Separate shake from intent. A pan, a walk forward or a slow push-in is movement you meant. Shake is the fast jitter on top. The software draws a smooth path through the camera's movement and treats everything off that path as shake.
Move each frame back onto the path, and crop. Each frame is shifted the opposite way to its shake. That leaves its edges wandering in and out of view, so the picture is cropped in and enlarged to hide them.

What does stabilising cost?

Every steadied shot pays for it somewhere. Knowing where helps you choose how far to go.

The cost	Why it happens	What to do about it
A tighter frame	The edges are cropped away to hide the moving borders	Shoot wider than you need; accept less smoothing
A softer picture	The cropped picture is enlarged to fill the frame	Record at a higher resolution than you deliver
Warping	Methods that bend parts of the frame differently can bend straight lines; Adobe's guide to its Warp Stabilizer warns of this	Choose a simpler method that only shifts the picture
Smeared frames	The motion blur from the shake is baked into each frame, and a steadied frame still carries it	Use a faster shutter when you shoot handheld
Jelly	A phone's rolling shutter skews upright lines during fast moves	Correct the rolling shutter as well as the shake

The smear is the one people miss. A steadied shot whose frames are blurred from shaking looks oddly soft, as if it pulses in and out of focus, and no stabiliser can take the blur back out.

When should you keep the shake?

When it is part of the shot. A walking vlog, a run through a crowd or a handheld scene in a drama feels alive because the camera breathes; locked off, it looks like a drone. Keep it too when the shake is tiny, because a stand-mounted shot with a slight tremble costs more in crop than it gains.

Sharpy makes that call for you. Stabilising is opt-in, because it costs pixels, and if the shake is under half a per cent of the frame, Sharpy does nothing and says why. A recording made on a stand measured 0.34%.

How do you stabilise a shaky video on a Mac with Sharpy?

Select the clip in the window and switch on stabilising.
Read what it tells you. Sharpy measures how much of the shot is shake and what removing it costs, then cancels the shake and crops in to keep the moving edges out of the frame.
Check the moves you meant. A deliberate pan survives; only the jitter on top is taken out.
Set it to taste. Choose the strength, lock it off so the shot looks as if it was on a tripod, and set the crop.
Or ask the agent. In Claude or Codex, "stabilise the handheld clips" does the same across the edit.

On a shot with a built-in wobble, the shake measured 5.6% of the frame before and 1.9% after, on the finished edit.

A man films a city street at night on a phone held up in one hand, the street lamps behind him blurred into soft circles of light. — A phone held up in one hand shakes the most. Use both hands, tuck your elbows and walk heel to toe: the less shake you record, the less of the frame stabilising has to crop away.Photo by apertur 2.8 on Pexels

Vertical video needs extra care. A 9:16 frame cut from a 16:9 recording is about a third as wide, so the same sideways shake is about three times larger in the finished picture. Sharpy corrects it at that size, in the frame you deliver. Converting horizontal video to vertical covers the reframing itself.

How do you keep a speaker where they started?

Use following instead of stabilising. When a presenter drifts around a handheld or slightly loose frame, following holds them where they are on the first frame and takes the wandering out of the rest. The first frame is unchanged, so to put the speaker somewhere else, move them with the crop first. It suits talking heads shot on a phone, where the camera is steady enough but the framing wanders. Editing a talking-head video goes through the rest of that edit.

What else goes wrong with handheld footage?

Shake rarely comes alone. Sharpy deals with the rest of it on your Mac too:

Rolling-shutter jelly and rotation. Sharpy removes the camera's rotation and the skew a phone's rolling shutter puts into fast moves.
The phone's own motion data. Where the phone recorded its movement, Sharpy uses it to steady the shot.
Flicker and noise. Low-light handheld footage is often noisy, and lights on the mains can flicker; Sharpy cleans up the noise and removes the flicker.

Is there a way to stabilise a shaky video for free?

Yes, on a Mac: iMovie, which comes free with it, has a stabiliser. Apple's guide describes the steps:

Select the clip in the timeline.
Click the stabilisation button in the adjustments bar and tick Stabilize Shaky Video.
Wait while iMovie analyses the clip, then drag the slider to set how much stabilising it applies.
For wobble from fast moves, tick Fix Rolling Shutter and choose an amount.

For finer control, Adobe Premiere's Warp Stabilizer lets you choose between keeping smooth camera motion and removing all of it, and how the moving edges are handled, from cropping to filling them from nearby frames. Sharpy is paid, with a 24-hour trial.

Frequently asked questions

Can you stabilize a video after it's taken?

Yes. Stabilising works on footage already recorded: it tracks the shake, moves each frame back and crops in to hide the edges. The steadier the original, the less it has to crop.

How do you make a shaky video stable?

After the fact, stabilise it and check the edges and any warping. Next time, hold the phone with both hands and your elbows tucked in, walk heel to toe, use the widest lens, and turn on the camera's own stabilisation.

Does stabilising reduce video quality?

A little. The crop means the picture is enlarged, so it is slightly softer, and blur from the shake stays in each frame. Recording at a higher resolution than you deliver hides most of it.

Why does my stabilised video look warped?

The stabiliser is bending parts of the frame to cancel the shake. Lower the smoothing or switch to a method that only shifts the picture, and accept a little more movement.

Can I add camera shake on purpose?

Yes. In Sharpy anything keyed can wander like a handheld camera, the same way every time it plays, and a camera shake sits on the motion shelf, flash-safe.

Sources

Checked on 18 October 2026.