I think you meant to say that "Steadyhand does not work with HDV footage..."

Also, why the need to put on 2002 frames? I did a lot of work with Deshaker last spring, and the only reason to append ANY additional frames was to give Deshaker a chance to to the edge fill thing with preceeding frames. Since I specified a 30 frame forward/backward lookup, I had to append a clip of 30 junk frames to the end of the raw video file, something done in just a second or two. So why 2002 frames?

Does the steadied HDV clip lose an acceptable amount of sharpness when compared to the original? Could Deshaker be used for HDV output?

If ever anything needed to be shot right in the first place it'd have to be HDV. The compression system used in HDV does not like shaky shots. No matter how good a job one could do in post to correct the movement it's very likely that irrepairable harm has been done to the image as it was recorded.
Given that HDV cameras are not exactly cheap it seems to me that decent tripods and other assorted ways of stabilising a camera are a pretty cheap and vital accessory.
I you're serious about shooting HiDef on a budget with HDV, I'd add a matte box and ND filters to that as well.
Why am I raving on about this, well there's a lot of us shooting HDV but not for HD delivery yet. I suspect once you come to see this wobbly footage in HD on a large screen even after you've stabilised it you might be a liitle disappointed.

Bob.

Well the shakey footage I've fixed with Deshaker looks really good. My complaint isn't how well it works (it works really well) but rather that it takes a lot of steps and time to get these good results.

Bob, I can confirm your observation about need for steadiness. Test shots done hand holding the bare camera (ie no shoulder mount) looked tolerable on a 17" screen, but rather vertiginous when projected. Perhaps it's not so much HDV (although I appreciate your point on the GOP) for a consequence of better resolution is wanting a bigger picture. When that fills a large proportion of your FOV, image unsteadiness bring on feelings of physical unease. But hey, people tell me that handheld wobbles convey "truth" and "integrity". Just sends me out the door.
Serena

Just a perhaps a bit of baseless speculation on my part. I get the feeling that higher definition images draw more attention to the image and how it was shot. Certainly the size at which the image is viewed has a big impact but I think for the same image size increasing the resolution alters how we judge the other aspects.

Getting back to Laurence's problem though, would it not be possible to automate the process somehow by writing a script in VB or something similar?
Bob.

What makes it hard to script deshaker is that deshaker generates a temporary log file on the first pass that is used during the second pass. Because of this I can't just batch file it. If it is possible to write a script that would do this I would be thrilled.

I'm not talking about deshaking badly shaken footage. I'm talking about getting rid of a small amount of shake in footage that was as steady as I could hold it without a tripod. I'm finding deshaker looks much better on HDV footage than it does on SD footage. The footage is captured as a Cineform AVI, then deshaken back to the same format. The extra HDV resolution means that the image still looks sharp after a slight zoom (I'm using a 10% zoom)

For what it's worth, the technique I eventually adopted for my DV Deshaking was to set the Deshaking variables on the low side (gentle shake reduction, not aggressive) because aggressive settings mean you'll have large black border areas i.e. Deshaker will try really hard to eliminate any motion, and will really slew the frames around in an effort to line up perfectly. Then, I don't use zoom at all, since in my opinion it really kills sharpness. Instead, I use the "edge fill" feature of Deshaker, which is also the major feature that sets it apart from SteadyHand. MOST of the time, Deshaker does a remarkably good job of filling in the edges with previous or post-frame data.

Finally, I use a 4% cookie-cutter crop on the finished footage to cover up most of the Deshaker edge-fill anyway. 4% is not much of a hit (TVs are up around 8-10%) and even if viewing the finished product on a PC, where there isn't any masking at all, a 4% black border is unnoticeable to nearly everyone I've ever questioned.

Even with all this the very act of deshaking results in a very slight softening of the raw video. I've experimented with putting in a hint of sharpening to compensate.

All in all, Deshaker is a wonderful tool, and some people ask me what it's like to wear a Steadycam rig when shooting on the run.

Well the cool thing about deshaking hdv is that you still have a pretty sharp looking image at the end. If you deshake and downrez to SD to burn to DVD, the footage still looks as sharp as SD can look. I've done some experiments deshaking then rendering to 24P DVD and the results look extremely good.

Which codec do you select in VirtualDub when you use Deshaker for the HDV stuff?

JJK

The Cineform codec. You need to buy ConnectHD in order to be able to use this codec outside of Vegas though.