This appears to be the latest version 2.6 and it also appears to be teh expert version since it is a 50% off deal (the expert is listed as 119.00 )

I got trapcode particular for AE from DJ during a 50% off deal. They seem to get these great deals on stuff for a limited time. Prices are comparable to Academic or upgrade prices often.

Has anyone tried this with Vegas? I just downloaded the demo. I have AE too but this would be great in Vegas for this price. I get tired trying to do it with DeShaker etc...

TomE

I believe this is the Expert version also due to the original price, but if you're going to buy it, you may want to confirm with Digital Juice or proDad.

There are several prior postings on this forum comparing this to DeShaker and I believe another stabilizing plugin. If I recall correctly, DeShaker had some higher quality renders but the settings adjustments in Mercalli are far easier. I've used Mercalli... it works wonders with certain footage. As has been pointed out, if there is a lot of motion on the subject's part (as compared to motion from the camera, which would be the purpose of the plugin to stabilize), it can inadvertently highlight the motion blur.

As far as I know the latest is 1.0.12
Since the price is half off it is the expert version.
I have Mercalli and the output looks good. It is very fast and does a very good job. Great plug-in. At the price you cannot pass it up.

OK.

Installed and waiting for the further registration to come back to me ..

However . . . In the video it shows how to make the plugin work over time. Meaning, one can adjust according to WHERE you are in time within the Event? Yes? Just how DO you do this In Vegas? It would be neat to be able to adjust the ferocity within an Event. I'm not getting how at the moment? Is this a drawback with the Vegas method of working?

Grazie

And BTW, the logo on the Plugin-chain says: "EXPERT VERSION - Mercalli"

Grazie

Registered and working.

People in Germany responded within 2 hours. Done!

Grazie

I am also trying to get the hang of it. What is this v2.6 posted by TomE? I can only see v1 on the proDad site and my bought version also shows v1.
Tom

It refers to what I saw yesterday on a proDAD "BOX" yesterday - 2.6. I must have seen Heroglyph Version: 2.6 - Apologies. Move on . . .

Grazie

:-) ta mate...
T

Tom P,

It must have been a misprint at Digital Juice. They have changed it now. Which had me confused since I downloaded the demo and it was version 1. something.

Seems to work fast. I have not tried it in AE yet but it did a pretty good job in Vegas 8. The trick is figuring out which setting you want to go with and dialing it in so you dont get too blurry a result.

I also didnt see anything keyframeable within the Vegas plugin. (at least in the demo) It would be nice to vary the settings a bit. Other wise you would need to split the events at each point where you wanted to do something a bit different or more specific to what is happening in that particular event.

But price is good for something that works this fast. If you are in a hurry this could be a great asset. But if you want the absolute best output you do have to experiment and apply it methodically. Definitely NOT a steadycam killer.

TomE

Ah! TomE you also saw the 2.6 reference? Maybe I DIDN'T get to heiro after all??

Non-Keyframeable is a bummer. I have a similar gripe with Vegas not dealing with other plugs that I can't be keframed. I was "sold" on the adjustability I saw in the demo. It was the band on stage? Split Events looks like it . . . . hmmmm....

Look, I've spent £30 quid, I have another steady software. I have deshake and SteadyHand, I'll use what I use when I need it and Merc is very easy to use and manage my work it. No complaints here. And yes, this ain't a sub for a steadycam device!!! - However, less pressure on my legs and bank balance . .

Grazie

Omg this product looks like a god send....
I am grabbing it for sure.

So I've downloaded the software and tested it on a couple of clips.
Fricken Awesome! I wish I had this a year ago.
Thank you for the heads up on this pluggin. This will be very effective.

I find this plug-in to be useful on somethings (it's my go to stabilizer), but if you get it, you should definitely do expert or not at all IMHO. It's nice that it works in Vegas, but it doesn't deal with 24p exactly correct in stuff that I've tested it on, so that's something to watch for, and it doesn't always show up, but I think it doesn't flag the corrected file and so Vegas doesn't see that it's supposed to be 24p.

Dave

Does it work on HDV material?

I was just using it on material shot in HDV 1080i imported inot a 1440x1080 60i template. As far as in the preview it looks solid but I haven't rendered anything out yet so I'm not sure what the final product looks like.

Edit> put it out as DVDA NTSC video stream for DVD at 720x480 16:9 m2t and Blu-ray 1440x1080 60i 25mbps m2t and they look great.

Thanks for the tip on this great deal -- have been wanting Mercalli for a while! (Deal still good as of today - July 31, 2008).

Thanks!

Keith

---
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To: "L8R"

I owned 2d3 SteadyMove (sp.?) years ago (not bad, but at the time I was steady enough to not need it or to put up with some of its quirks, so it went unused). This offer on the Mercalli plugin looked very tempting until I looked at all the samples in the demo carefully (with pausing of the video for freeze-framing) and also all of the comparison videos. While I wanted to like this program (and it does seem nicely designed, once one gets past the "quaint" function descriptions ;-), I could not help but notice that in ALL of the tiny samples, the "fixed" versions, small as they were, were clearly less sharp than the originals. If this is true for processed HDV, this would be unacceptable to me (I'm a sharpness nut! ;-). I would take some camera motion any day over variable and overall reduced sharpness. Maybe by now you have directly compared HDV footage processed with Mercalli with the raw footage, and can tell us the results?
Thanks.
--DR

If you don't want black borders, some softening is inevitable--simply a result of having to zoom in on the image. You could opt for the "filled-in" borders, but to me this usually looks much worse.

You could apply a sharpen fx afterwards, but it would rarely look as good as the original.

If rendering to SD from HDV, the softening would not be noticeable.

One trick. If you're shooting and you know you'll need to stabilise it afterwards increasing the shutter speed can be a help but only if you have enough light. What can happen is the motion of the camera and subject creates motion blur and the trails from the natural motion blur looks wierd once the image is stabilised.

Bob.

DRuether:

I have little experience with Mercalli, but do a search on this board and you will find numerous previous discussions comparing Mercalli to DeShaker, a plugin used with the freeware VirtualDub.

Virtualdub is, in my view, a much more sophisticated stabilizer but in the past has been much more cumbersome to use. You first render the clip out to a format VDub can use, then append a black dummy clip to the front, then run the DeShaker first pass, then the second pass, then remove the dummy clip, then bring the clip back into Vegas. Whew.

But now there's a script (by John Meyer, I believe) that automates the whole thing, making DeShaking as difficult as (1) selecting a clip and (2) clicking the script button.

You mention sharpness issues. I think there are two sources. First, apparently any stabilization program works on fields independently, so that the final clip has half the vertical resolution as the source. In my projects, my HDV clips always get downrezzed to DVD anyway, so the slight vertical softening is never noticed.

Secondly, stabilizing means moving fields around, which means having odd black borders moving around. The traditional way to fix this was to zoom in slightly, further reducing resolution. I believe Mercalli offers a "smear" fill-in, where the black areas are filled with pixel values of the immediately adjacent image. Some may like the effect; I didn't. One of DeShaker's great strengths is that it can fill in black areas with frame information from times just before or just after the particular frame. Most of the time, this works beautifully, and artifacts are usually surprisingly minor.

Again, do a search on this board, where these topics have been discussed in the past by people smarter than me.

To: "pathlight", "farss", and "riredale" --

Thanks for the comments. I pretty well knew the reasons for the softening (but I was surprised how much was evident in the small samples), although the suggestion to use higher shutter speeds was a good one, and the info about VirtualDub was also useful. I recently looked at a clip I had shot hand-held with Mini-DV and processed with 2d3 (followed by moderate sharpening) and the results were good enough (and the black edges were covered by the normal cropping of SD TV - not true for HD...) - but HD motion smoothing may be a different matter. I have ordered a trial version of Mercalli to see what it can do. BTW, I have been trying my best to smooth the hand-held image at the "front end", with a now light-weight and compact folding device consisting of a bar with handle, a folding brace, and a mini-pod (the main bar goes out to my left hand, the folding brace goes over my right shoulder, the mini-pod sits against my chest and right collar bone, and a small quick release gets the HV20 on and off the rig easily).

--DR