Comments

taliesin wrote on 4/12/2004, 5:05 AM
You can use the freeware VirtualDub with a stabilizer plugin. No way in Vegas itself.

Marco
Jay Gladwell wrote on 4/12/2004, 9:08 AM
Or you could use SteadyHand.

http://www.dynapel.com/products/video_editing_prod.shtml

J--
patreb wrote on 4/12/2004, 12:31 PM
Anyone knows how those compare to After Effect's stabilizer?

Thanks.
Hunter wrote on 4/12/2004, 1:12 PM
Here is a users split screen of SteadyHand at work Split
TheWoodsman wrote on 4/12/2004, 1:36 PM
SteadyHand can perform beautifully for correcting mild to moderate camera motion, but there are several considerations to keep in mind:

1) A portion of the four edges of the image must be sacrificed either by zooming (not recommended if you want to maintain resolution) or by using a cookie cutter in Vegas;

2) The picture is blurred whenever the camera moves, just like when you shake a camera when shooting a still picture. This is not noticable when the image is jumping, but when it is stabilized, you can see intermittent blurring;

3) Stabilization is performed vertically, horizontally, for ratation and for zooming. The zoom stablization should be defeated because it can often cause annoying pulsations;

4) SteadyHand can be momentarily confused by sudden changes in light intensity, e.g. when a flash picture is taken or a light turned on.

If you do stabilization for a client, they should be notified about these issues so they will not expect miracles and be disappointed.
johnmeyer wrote on 4/12/2004, 2:42 PM
I use Steadyhand, but it can easily be fooled, as already described.

A product that looks like it produces better results (based only on the demos at their site) is SteadyMove. This is built into Adobe's Premiere Pro. However, it is not available as a standalone and, alas, is not available as a plug-in for Vegas (I will refrain from another rant about lack of plugins for Vegas). This is the statement from their web site:

"Steadymove PRO only works under Adobe Premiere 6.0, 6.5 and Premiere Pro, After Effects 5.5 and 6.0, and Combustion 2 running on the Windows operating system. At the present time we have no plans to port SteadyMove to OSX or Linux, nor to support any additional host applications. "

The plugin for VirtualDub is DeShaker. I assume that it will not work inside of Vegas using Wax 2.0's Virtualdub plugin facility because it has to look at more than one frame at a time to do its work.
taliesin wrote on 4/12/2004, 4:19 PM
Right - Deshaker does not work inside Vegas because of it's 2-pass processing. You need to use VirtualDub for the job. But the results are great.

Marco