Cut the camera shake out of your Premiere Pro footage

Shakefree finds the shaky seconds in your clips and hands Premiere Pro a sequence with them cut. You review the shakes in the browser, then import one XML file.

How it works

1. Drop your clips. Or a Premiere Pro project with its videos. Shakefree reads them in your browser.
2. Review the shakes. Each shake shows in red on the clip's timeline. Play them, and move the sensitivity if you want more or fewer.
3. Export to Premiere Pro. Shakefree writes an FCP7 XML file, the format Premiere Pro imports with File, Import. Import it and the cuts are already made.

What Premiere Pro gets

Premiere Pro gets FCP7 XML (.xml). In Premiere Pro choose File, Import and pick the file. A new sequence opens with your clip already cut. Shakefree can also write a cleaned MP4 of the clip if you do not need a timeline.

The output options

You choose what the file holds:

• Stable only. The timeline with the shakes removed.
• Shakes only. Only the shaky parts, to check what was cut.
• Markers only. The full clip with a marker on every shake, nothing cut.

Ripple closes the gaps a cut leaves, or keeps them so the rest of the timeline does not move. You choose before you export.

Two tracks (stable and shakes side by side) needs Resolve XML or FCPXML. Premiere Pro XML carries the other three.

Clean a whole sequence

Already cutting? Export the sequence from Premiere Pro with File, Export, Final Cut Pro XML. Drop that XML on Shakefree together with its videos. Shakefree matches every clip to its video by name, scans them, and saves yourproject-shakefree.xml. Import it back into Premiere Pro. Your edits, titles and music stay where they were. Only the shaky parts of the video clips are cut.

An example

Bhangra dance at a reception 6:02

One continuous glide cam shot of a six-minute dance routine. The shooter kept recording while resting between moves.

1 clip, 10 shakes, 16 percent of it shaky. Watch the clip on YouTube

Shake counts from the Shakefree Premiere plugin on the same clips, published on wobbleai.com in 2020. The web app uses a newer version of the same detector, so a scan today can differ by a shake or two. More examples on the camera shake page.

Why cut instead of stabilize

A stabilizer smooths small, steady movement. When the camera jerks in several directions at once, or the shooter walks to a new spot while recording, the frames are blurred and there is nothing steady to recover. Those seconds have to go. Shakefree finds them so you do not have to scrub for them. Read more about camera shake.