I'm finalizing a year's worth of daily photograpy into a time lapse movie. Of course the daily shots never quite line up, and I need to stabilize the image sequence. I'm using the Warp Stabilizer in Adobe CS 5.5 (10.5.0.253) version on a Mac MacBook Pro Core i7 with a 1Tb SSD HD and 8Gb of RAM.
Because this is year-round outdoor photography, various conditions like snow, rain, humidity, etc. cause tree branches in outer 1/3rd of the photos to droop or rise up. The stabilizer ends up using these objects to stabilize, instead of the more stable elements (ground, rocks) in the center of the picture. It causes AE to "roll" the photos back and forth. You can see the images I'm using for this on my Flickr account here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30664653@N03/sets/72157633131214843/ and here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/30664653@N03/sets/72157634112948001/ (I also have a 3rd still unpublished site)
Is there a way to define the area, or tracking points, used in Warp Stabilizer, or perhaps tell it to ignore the outer 20% of the picture? Or do I need to go the more manual "Tracker" route to accomplish this?
I also tried using Photoshop to align the pictures, but with an image set of 390 photos (some days more than one photo was taken), photoshop just chokes.
Once I get my last photograph the morning of Dec. 31st, I'm hoping to have all my time lapses finished, uploaded, and published by 5pm New Year's eve.
Any suggestions would be greatly welcome.