In Adobe Premiere Pro or After Effects, you set Framing to “Stabilize Only” inside the Warp Stabilizer effect controls. This option stabilizes your footage without any automatic cropping or scaling, leaving the full frame visible, including the moving black edges that result from the stabilization process. Here’s exactly how to do it and when you’d want to.
How to Change the Framing Setting
First, apply Warp Stabilizer to your clip. In Premiere Pro, go to the Effects panel, open Video Effects, then scroll to Distort and double-click Warp Stabilizer. In After Effects, the path is the same. Once the effect is applied, it begins analyzing your footage automatically.
After the analysis finishes, look at the Effect Controls panel. You’ll see a section called Framing with a dropdown menu. By default, it’s set to “Stabilize, Crop, Auto-scale.” Click that dropdown and select “Stabilize Only.” The effect will re-process, and you’ll immediately notice the edges of your frame shifting around, with black borders appearing and disappearing as the footage moves.
What “Stabilize Only” Actually Does
Warp Stabilizer works by shifting, rotating, or warping each frame to counteract camera shake. That repositioning means the edges of your original footage no longer line up neatly with the frame boundaries. Normally, the default setting hides this by cropping into the image and scaling it up to fill the screen. “Stabilize Only” skips both of those steps. It shows you the entire stabilized frame, moving black edges and all.
This is useful because it lets you see exactly how much correction the stabilizer is applying. If the black borders are barely visible, the shot was fairly steady to begin with. If they’re large and shifting dramatically, the stabilizer is working hard, and you may want to dial back the smoothness or try a different method to avoid artifacts.
When you select Stabilize Only, two other controls become unavailable: the Auto-scale section and the Crop Less / Smooth More slider. Those controls only apply when the effect is handling the cropping for you.
How It Compares to Other Framing Modes
Warp Stabilizer offers three framing options, each building on the previous one:
- Stabilize Only displays the full frame with moving edges. No cropping, no scaling. You handle the edges yourself.
- Stabilize, Crop removes the moving edges by cropping into the footage but does not scale the image back up. Your video will appear smaller within the frame, surrounded by a static black border. This is the same as using Auto-scale with a maximum scale of 100%.
- Stabilize, Crop, Auto-scale (the default) crops the edges and then enlarges the image to fill the frame again. This is the most hands-off option, but it reduces image quality because the footage is being scaled up.
There’s also a fourth option called “Synthesize Edges” that attempts to fill in the black borders by generating content from neighboring frames, though results vary depending on the footage.
Why You’d Choose Stabilize Only
The most common reason is to avoid the quality loss that comes with automatic scaling. When the default mode scales your footage up, even by 10 or 15%, it softens the image. Adobe’s own guidance suggests keeping any additional scaling below 115% to maintain acceptable quality. If you’re working with 4K footage destined for a 1080p timeline, you already have room to reposition and crop manually without losing sharpness, making “Stabilize Only” the better starting point.
Editors working in compositing workflows also prefer this mode. If the stabilized clip is going to be layered over other elements, or if you plan to reframe the shot manually using position and scale keyframes, you don’t want the effect making its own cropping decisions. Stabilize Only gives you clean, stabilized motion data without any automatic reframing getting in the way.
It’s also a diagnostic tool. Switching to Stabilize Only before committing to your final settings lets you evaluate the stabilization quality. You can spot warping artifacts, jittery edges, or overcorrection more easily when the full frame is visible.
Handling the Black Edges
If you’re seeing moving black borders after applying Warp Stabilizer, you likely already have Stabilize Only selected (or switched to it by accident). To remove those borders, you have a few options depending on your goals.
The simplest fix is switching the Framing dropdown back to “Stabilize, Crop, Auto-scale,” which handles everything automatically. If you’d rather keep control, leave it on Stabilize Only and manually scale the clip up using the Motion controls in the Effect Controls panel. This lets you choose exactly how much to scale and where to position the frame, rather than letting the algorithm decide. You can also use the “Additional Scale” property within the Warp Stabilizer effect itself to nudge the image up just enough to hide the edges.
For footage shot at a higher resolution than your sequence, the cleanest approach is to nest the stabilized clip or use it in a larger composition, then scale and reposition to taste. You get stable footage with no quality penalty.
Equivalent Settings in DaVinci Resolve
DaVinci Resolve doesn’t use the same “Framing” terminology, but you can achieve a similar result. In Resolve’s stabilization controls, the Zoom toggle is what hides or reveals the black bars caused by stabilization. Turning Zoom off gives you the same outcome as Stabilize Only: you see the full corrected frame with its shifting edges. From there, you can adjust the Cropping Ratio to control how much of the footage gets trimmed, and the Strength and Smooth sliders to fine-tune how aggressively the stabilizer corrects the motion.