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🎬 YouTube Mastery

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Stabilizing your walking videos / selfie sticks

2:48 Video (12 MB) HD Video (45 MB) Audio (3 MB)
If you are making videos where you are walking outside for a common type of video, I wanna highly recommend that you either don't walk because even slow amount even amazingly slow walking makes the video busying to some people, myself included, I get nauseated fairly strangely quickly by people walking videos. So don't do it. Don't don't walk. But if you're going to walk, walk slowly. Because, I mean, really slowly.
You you can't imagine even slow walking looks really fast on video. You will notice like, oh my gosh. It's good. Backgrounds. Like, it's because the video is so close to you, so it looks like you're you're you're, like, running, but you're just walking slowly or normally.
If you're going to walk at all, okay, or move around at all in your in your outdoors videos, consider either using stabilization software, which comes with some phones these days, some phone cameras are really sophisticated. And when you make a moving video, you'll notice that, wow, it's remarkably stable. My face is remarkably stable, and the background is kinda smooth. And below this video, I've given you a couple of examples of I've given you one example of a video that's quite old, like six years old where the software. The software was stabilizing, and it's not the best it's not as good as the technology these days.
But so you can see, like, throughout that video, it's a little bit distortion in the background. You can see some twists some things are twisting around, but that's stabilization software. If you can't if you don't have that software, if you try making a video walking around and it looks kinda dizzying to you, you don't have the software on your phone. And so you can use hardware for stabilizing yourself, and that's basically using a selfie stick. A selfie stick, even a $20, $10 selfie stick will walking around with that will make it more stable than probably using your arm.
Also, the farther away the camera is from your face, the less dizzying it is when you're moving around. Because the closer it is when you're moving around, it's it's more dizzying. So But like I said, you know, I generally making outdoors videos, I recommend just staying in one place. It's nice enough outdoors. You don't have to walk around.
You know, George, I think better walking around. Okay. That's fine. But if you can stay in one place and just occasionally move you know, if you want it for visual interest, if you think onboarding, I needed something more interesting. Just pan them out a little bit.
Anyway, I have another video I think you you may have seen earlier in this course about outdoors videos. So I hope this is helpful, and below this video are some resources for you to check out.

Newer phone cameras have video stabilization built into the software. Try walking and recording and see if the background looks smooth or bumpy.

Example of video that is using stabilization software

Example of video that uses selfie stick for less bumpiness

Example of video that uses neither (thank goodness I was barely walking at all)

Hardware that helps stabilize... 

Selfie sticks (cheap option - good enough for most people) 

Phone stabilizers (more expensive and pro)

Cheapest: use your arm and it'll get stronger ;-)

Or how about stand in one place and slowly pan around if the background is beautiful?

Here again is the outdoors video I made about outdoors videos ;-)

Last updated 13 Feb 2024.