But using a "stabilized" material for a serious HD production? C'mon - it's out of question to me.

I don't know about Hornets nests, but Piotr, where is this stated? I don't think anybody would argue the point.

Grazie

Grazie, "stir up a hornets' nest" is what I found in the idiom dictionary - my English is not good enough to always rely on it; has the expression been used improperly?

As to your main point, judging from the number of threads and posts in each of them, I was under impression people would like to make one of these tools a part of their regular video editing:)

I have the impression that all the video stabilizers are skipping over huge amounts of data to decrease processing time causing the "jello" effect when you put the softwares into the serious power mode.
JJK

""stir up a hornets' nest" is what I found in the idiom dictionary - my English is not good enough to always rely on it"

As far as I can tell, contemporary English consists of nothing more than ~300,000 idioms and a few hundred meaningful verbs (all of which are conjugated using exceptions to meaningless rules). :-)

Every so often I see a bit of HD video on the discovery channel that you can tell is stabilized. You can tell either because of a bit of moving lens flare or because there is a bit of water splashed on the lens. I have a feeling that the big boys use stabilization quite a bit: especially since many of the high end lenses don't have any stabilization built in. I think that stabilization is a wonderful tool that can look just great in even the highest end HD productions.

"This may be just stirring up a hornets' nest, but my opinion is that none of the "stabilizers" (I've tested the Deshaker script with and without the Interface, as well as the Meraclli and now NewBlue) is good enough for HD video."

Offhand, I'd have to agree with you. The present algorithms look pretty good at DV resolutions, but the tracking and the interpolation often breaks down at 1080p.

The results of stabilization can be compared to using too low a bit rate for encoding and getting compression artifacts. With HD video, you can almost always see the subtle (and often not so subtle) changes that stabilization has introduced to the footage. There is the inevitable edge effect. Sure, you can eliminate that by zooming in to a moving anchor point, but then you have lost resolution. Then there is the blurring/shimmering, due to interpolating adjacent frames.

But what if you have footage and you absolutely need to use use it, despite its condition? Then you stabilize it and that's that. In these circumstances, the real question is not whether you should stabilize, but rather how and with what tool. Think for a moment about the incredible documentary series, Planet Earth. PE has some of the most striking video you will ever see. But it also has some bad quality shots (long range, fuzzy zooms, footage shot in snow storms, bad lighting, etc.) that often took months to complete,because of the rarity of the circumstances. That's just the way things are.