Mercalli 4 Plugin bug?

3POINT wrote on 12/27/2016, 7:24 AM

Since the release of VegasPro14 with the Mercalli 4 Plugin, I'm not able to get good results when trying to stabilize interlaced footage. The results are always worse then the originals. When stabilizing the same interlaced footage with the Mercalli 4 SAL (demo version) the results are always perfect.

By accident I found a solution for this, in my opinion, Mercalli 4 Plugin bug. When the project settings of Vegas are set to progressive instead of interlaced, interlaced footage on the timeline is correctly analyzed by the Mercalli 4 Plugin and the stabilizing result is as perfect as with Mercalli 4 SAL. After completing analyzing all interlaced events on the timeline, you can reset the project settings back to interlaced and render your perfectly stabilized interlaced project as usual.

Comments

toineenzo wrote on 12/28/2016, 4:55 PM

You mean, that the "stabilized" footage is still unstable or do you mean that it is all blurry and that it seems like the quality has been downgraded?

Thanks for the solution btw :)

3POINT wrote on 12/29/2016, 10:43 AM

When analyzing interlaced footage with the Mercalli 4 plugin with project settings set to interlaced in VegasPro 14, the result is even more shaky than the original footage. Doing the same with project settings set to progressive, the result is perfectly stabilized. Of course you will loose some detail resolution due to the stabilization.

3POINT wrote on 1/6/2017, 6:04 AM

I just got a confirmation from Prodad that there is indeed a bug in VegasPro14 which gives the wrong information to the Mercalli 4 Plugin, when trying to analyze and stabilize "interlaced" footage. Setting the "interlaced" Project to "progressive" solves the problem, as I described above.

Dexcon wrote on 1/6/2017, 6:46 AM

I've been unhappy with the Mercalli 4 Vegas Pro 13 plug-in from the beginning - I always got results that were way more shaky than was the original footage (mentioned before in a couple of my previous posts). Based on this post, I just tried in VP13 using Mercalli 4 plug-in on an interlaced HD clip (1920x1080i) but changing Project Preferences to progressive. The result was good - it was properly stabilised. Wow! Very good at last.

Thank you 3POINT for your post - the problem evidently is not only with VP14 but also with VP13.

Nonetheless, I much prefer Mercalli 4 SAL mostly because the default large viewer makes stabilisation assessments more accurate.

3POINT wrote on 1/6/2017, 2:03 PM

Nonetheless, I much prefer Mercalli 4 SAL mostly because the default large viewer makes stabilisation assessments more accurate.

I don't understand your argument because in Vegas I have the option to scale the Preview as large as I want, full screen if necessary, or the ability to extend the preview (full screen) to an external monitor.