Stabilization crop
Also known as: stabilisation crop, crop factor from stabilisation
The frame a camera gives up to electronic stabilisation, which needs spare picture around the edges to shift each frame into place.
Updated
What it means
Electronic stabilisation works by moving each frame to cancel the camera movement, and moving a frame requires picture outside the visible area to move into. That margin is the crop.
The stronger the correction, the wider the margin has to be. A gentle mode gives up a little and a heavy one gives up a lot, so Electronic image stabilization (EIS) always trades field of view for steadiness.
It is why a stabilised clip looks tighter than the lens suggests. The sensor recorded wider than what was delivered, and the difference went into holding the horizon still.
How it works in practice
Shooting wider than the intended delivery leaves room for the crop. A very wide mode gives stabilisation something to work with where a narrow one leaves it nothing.
Crops also stack rather than replacing each other. Stabilisation, then Fisheye correction, then any levelling each take their own margin, and the result can be noticeably tight.
Checking the delivered frame rather than the specification is the habit worth having, since the number on the camera describes the sensor and not what reaches the edit. A test clip settles it in moments.
What to watch out for
Stacking corrections is where resolution quietly disappears. A clip stabilised, straightened and levelled can deliver far fewer pixels than the file size implies.
Heavy correction on a very shaky clip also runs out of margin, at which point the stabilisation either gives up or starts warping the frame to cope, and Dewarping afterwards cannot undo either outcome.
Reframing afterwards then has nothing left to use, so an already cropped clip is a poor candidate for Auto-reframe or for any further change of aspect ratio. The margin was spent on steadiness and cannot be spent twice.
How RawClip handles it
Clips are analysed as delivered, with whatever crop the camera already applied, because nothing can recover frame that was given up during recording. Footage that still has room around the subject scores better on framing for exactly that reason, since a tight crop leaves nothing for composition to work with.