We have conducted a sensitivity analysis to determine the PSNR reduction occurring from increased levels of hand jitter while recording video. To conduct this sensitivity analysis we proposed and utilized a hand jitter model. We observe from our analysis that increased hand jitter certainly lowers the PSNR. More importantly, we observe that the magnitude of the reduction in PSNR of increasing hand jitter is increased with less motion in the video. With this insight we developed a decision rule that decides when to activate a video stabilization algorithm. This decision rule requires the distinction between motion created by the scene and motion created by hand jitter as well as a mechanism to measure this motion.