I seems to recall SteadyHand by Dynapel:



HTH, MPH

If the footage is shaky the software takes stabilizes the video clip ie smoothes it out.

I 've tried Dynapel,it works to a certain degree but whe applying slow-mo in VV it becomes blurry

fuzzzzy

This is the drawback to stabilizing the video. Remember the old saying "crap in... crap out!" What Dynapel SteadyCam or any other video stabilizing software does is adds frames a recreates the images that should have been if the camera was smooth. Dynapel is supposed to be the best one out there. It has a few settings. With one you can have it stabilize the video without cropping. This is probably the best option if you want to maintain quality, but it leaves crooked black regions. Another setting is to crop the image. This is the next best, but you lose some of the edges and you get a black frame around the video. The last is to crop the image and zoom. This is allright, but you lose some video around the edges too and you lose quality because it zooms in. If use the crop and zoom for editing in VV or another video editor, you will lose even more quality. The best thing to do is to use the first option and then do the cropping and editing in VV instead of with SteadyCam.

On a side note, to prevent camera shaking, use a tripod or unipod. You can even put casters on some brands to make them mobile.

thanks for the info..

My problem is that the video was taken of a sailing yacht and the footage was of us also in a sailing yacht in quite windy conditions...hence the shake.. :)
fuzzzzy

If you're trying to stabilize motion from the deck of a boat, Good Luck. The Dynapel product does wonders for little shaky motion like tremors, but if the image is slewing 50% all over the place, you're going to lose most of the picture. Keep in mind what the software is doing--it's looking at successive frames and trying to find what areas are in common throughout. Those areas that are out of bounds are set to black, and the common area is locked down solid. The effect is as though you shot the video with a really nice fluid head tripod, but the flip side is that you lose your edges. With lots of motion you will lose a huge amount of edge area; hence, the small stabilized area. When you enlarge it to re-fill the frame, the resolution is correspondingly reduced.

What I wish Dynapel would do is to offer additional settings where the user can specify how hard to "lock down" the image, so that a decent compromise can be reached in these cases.

There is also a Glidecam system that is in the range of 600 USD which can eliminate quite a bit of shaking, 600 includes a body mount and wrist supports as well as the actual stabilizer, its a bit bulky but the closes anyone will get to steadycam for a hobbiest..

D.

There are several good things about www.dynapel.com and its SteadyHand image stabilizer. For one, it will stabilize MANY situations. But, not all turn out well.

Unfortunately, it will make somethings worse.

First off, I should mention that it never TOUCHES your original source. Good start!

It has a variety of settings that allow the user, under Custom settings, to decide how much to crop and how much to analyze. These settings are the fine controls that someone earlier mentioned they wished they had which would allow the user to set how much it clamped down on the source.

I have found that just letting it leave black areas around the stable area is often more of a problem than a solution. Sometimes it is just better to take the zoom settings as they default and settle for the fact that you are going to lose some of the outer edges of the source, and lose resolution when it zooms back in to fill the 720x480 DV screen. The other ways may preserve the resolution, but sometimes those black areas can go crazy. Adjusting for them in VV can be VERY frustrating and time consuming.

The biggest single source of "failed" attempts to stabilize something (That is, when WEIRD things happen.) is when:

1. something rapidly moves into and then out of the scene. Think telephone poles, cars, bicycles, even birds, up close, etc. You get strange zooms as SteadyHand tries to stabilize something that is moving besides the camcorder.

2. you have repetitive motion in the scene. Think rocking chair in a still room. If the rocking chair and person take up the majority of the screen, SteadyHand will try to stop the rocking motion, and the ROOM will start moving back and forth. Interesting effect, but seldom desirable.

I like this program, very much, and use it regularly on shots taken from cars, planes, ships, etc., remembering the two problem areas mentioned above. It can save some, but not all shots. I wouldn't even say most shots, but certainly some.

GlideCam and SteadyCam can help in some situations, but seldom enough in really bumpy situations. Used WITH SteadyHand, you can really expect better results in some situation.

My major dislikes:

You have to do one scene at a time. In VV, which captures one scene at a time, this is simple, but timeconsuming and booooring. Other capture software sometimes captures the whole video as one file and makes logical markers which SEEM to indicate that the video is broken into separate clips. If you have one LONG file, with many scenes, then the End of one scene will interfere with the analyzation of the Beginning of the next scene, and "VisaVersa," and you get odd results.

Doing one scene at a time allows you to view each finished scene as it is done, but you have to sit there about 20 minutes for every 1 minute of video (using a 1 GHz machine). Did I mention, booooooring!

I would like, and have suggested to DynaPel, that they make a batch process and allow ALL clips to be processed overnight. Since the SteadyHand program makes new, renamed files and doesn't alter the original, this is fine. After everything is done, you can pick and chose from the VV preview mode. This is expecially easy to do with an external monitor. The good ones you use, the bad ones (odd results) you ignore and use the original.

If you ever get to making suggestions, please go to www.dynapel.com and suggest they make a batch processing mode. They say it will be done when enough people ask for it. I have written them often about various things, and they always respond with good ideas. Nice people.

They also have other programs, such as SlowMotion, which analyzes scenes and interpolates new "half-way between" frames to expand the time to make things run slower. Some other software merely duplicates existing frames, which may be clearer, but it causes jerkyness. I don't know how well this stacks up to VV's Slow Motion capabilities because I have never had occasion to use either one.

They also have a FREE VideoAnalizer program that you can download. Modest, but quite useful under some circumstances.

Again, if you drop into www.dynapel.com, suggest the Batch Processing to them, please.

And, you might suggest to SonicFoundry that they consider contacting DynaPel. There is already a plug-in for Adobe's Premier using SteadyHand. If people ask for it, or if SonicFoundry askes for it, or even does it (as DynaPel allows), it would make a NICE addition to the plug-in chain in VV.

Another odd problem is when you have a time/date stamp on the video. Dynapel doesn't take this into consideration during analyzing which results in the time/date stamp moving around the screen.

I only had the problem of a time/date stamp occur once. I trimmed the time/date stamp out. rendered it to DV, recaptured it without the time/date stamp, problem solved. Assuming, of course, you can do without the stamp and the scenes that carry it.

I've used Dynapel and like it, but sometimes you have to go manual: I have some footage of bald eagles flying around. The cam was mounted on a tripod, but it was still impossible to follow the birds smoothly. No short jerks and shakes because the cam was damped (on the tripod with resistance to movement), but the birds were moving all over the viewfinder (it was about 0 degF and windy, so I was using thick gloves and still having a little trouble feeling my fingers :-).

I keyframed into a zoom, truncating the DV footage to 540 pixels wide (reducing the visible picture to 75% of original). Then, I manually moved the "zoomed camera" around the larger picture using additional keyframes to keep the birds "centered".

With rapid camera jerking, this is impractical. However, with slow but steady camera jerking it works very well. And it actually goes quite quickly. I simply picked a point on the bird, clicked to "center the keyframe", moved ahead a few frames, then clicked again to "recenter". Use playback to evaluate your work and readjust the keyframes as needed.

One caveat is that I have not yet burned the footage to DVD and evaluated it on a good monitor, so I cannot comment on the quality of "540 pixel footage". I don't know if the 75% reduction was a good number or not -- I presume some multiples are better than others in order for VV3 to perform good interpolation, and if you reduce the picture too much you lose additional quality.