Remove black borders from stabilized clips

When you use the Stabilize behavior, the resulting transformations that smooth or stabilize the shot cause moving black borders to appear around the edges of the image. Although this is necessary to achieve the desired effect, you probably don’t want these black borders to appear in the final shot.

Use the following methods to remove black borders.

Zoom the clip

You can zoom the clip using the Borders pop-up menu in the Behaviors Inspector. Be aware that zooming the clip may soften of the image.

In the Behaviors Inspector, choose Zoom from the Borders pop-up menu.
The clip is expanded to the full size of the Canvas, preventing black borders from appearing around the edges.

Scale the stabilized clip

If you want to output the resulting clip at the same size as the original, the quickest fix is to scale the image after the Stabilize analysis. You’ll need to enlarge the image to the point where all instances of black borders fall outside the edges of the frame. Like the Zoom option (in the Borders pop-up menu), this method softens the image.

Note: This workflow is a manual version of zooming the clip using the Zoom option from the Borders pop-up menu.

Select the clip and open the Properties Inspector.
Adjust the Scale parameter so the borders no longer appear at the edges of the clip.

Distort the edges of the clip

You can experiment with filters to stretch the edges of the image to fill gaps. The following example uses the Scrape filter. (This solution is highly dependent on the type of image and may introduce other image artifacts that may not be acceptable.)

Select the group in which the stabilized clip resides.
Apply a Scrape filter to the group, then adjust the Center and Rotation parameters.
The left image shows the clip when the filter is applied to the group. The right image shows the result of adjusting the Center and Rotation parameters: the black edge is stretched to the right side of the image.