I'm just finishing up my surround-sound epic involving a whole lot of walking shots. I think I'm fairly decent at holding the camera steady, but I was appalled when I watched some of my stuff on the new big-screen monitor. I should be forced to provide motion sickness bags along with the finished DVD.
Anyway, in the past I've used SteadyHand from time to time, but only on the most egregious video footage, since (1) it softens the video to a certain extent, (2) adds a bit of "strobing" to the video, and (3) creates the moving black border. It was the last effect which was the most serious in my view, and I compensated by using a moderate Cookie Cutter outline in Vegas to hide the motion of that border.
In light of the new footage and also some glowing past reviews of DeShaker, I decided to give it a try. Based on encoding the same clips in both SteadyHand and DeShaker, I've decided to switch. Here's why:
(1) Both products accomplish essentially the same thing, but SteadyHand seems to introduce a subtle "strobe" effect to the video. Upgrading to the most recent version helped some, but the effect is still there.
(2) DeShaker is much more involved and thus a bit of a pain, but with some practice the operations become ingrained. It would SURE be nice to have some sort of script and also a batch file feature!
(3) Both products soften the video slightly. I can live with the hit.
(4) The killer feature of DeShaker is the ability to fill in the black borders with parts of before or after frames. In most cases, there is even no need for a Cookie Cutter mask, though I now automatically use a 5% mask on everything I do. It hides nearly all of the remaining artifacts, and yet is not visible on any of my TV sets, including the new 62" DLP (which uses 7% overscan, I've determined).
One could eliminate the border entirely on either product by zooming in the resulting video. I rejected that approach early on simply because it introduced further softening and artifacting of the image.
(5) Both are slow. Given a 13.5 second clip, SteadyHand took my PC 2:35 to steady, while DeShaker took about 4:30 of processing for the various steps, plus maybe a minute of manual mousing around (selecting Pass 2, selecting DV avi encoding at the end, removing the 30 frame black leader). The minute of manual labor would be gone if an automated script were available. So even in a best-case situation, DeShaker is about 1/20 realtime. This is with an AMD 2100xp system, so these days one should be able to double the rendering speed on a newish system.
Still, the results are very pleasing. I do note an occasional MPEG2-like minor artifact on the DeShaker results when viewed on the big screen TV that are not present on my interlaced sets. I attribute this to some sort of interaction of the video with the deinterlacing/upscaling function of the TV (the TV has a DLP display of 1280x720 pixels, so it not only deinterlaces NTSC video but also upscales to the higher pixel count).
Bottom line: very, very smooth Steadicam-like results. Not perfect, but very usable for my purposes.
Anyway, in the past I've used SteadyHand from time to time, but only on the most egregious video footage, since (1) it softens the video to a certain extent, (2) adds a bit of "strobing" to the video, and (3) creates the moving black border. It was the last effect which was the most serious in my view, and I compensated by using a moderate Cookie Cutter outline in Vegas to hide the motion of that border.
In light of the new footage and also some glowing past reviews of DeShaker, I decided to give it a try. Based on encoding the same clips in both SteadyHand and DeShaker, I've decided to switch. Here's why:
(1) Both products accomplish essentially the same thing, but SteadyHand seems to introduce a subtle "strobe" effect to the video. Upgrading to the most recent version helped some, but the effect is still there.
(2) DeShaker is much more involved and thus a bit of a pain, but with some practice the operations become ingrained. It would SURE be nice to have some sort of script and also a batch file feature!
(3) Both products soften the video slightly. I can live with the hit.
(4) The killer feature of DeShaker is the ability to fill in the black borders with parts of before or after frames. In most cases, there is even no need for a Cookie Cutter mask, though I now automatically use a 5% mask on everything I do. It hides nearly all of the remaining artifacts, and yet is not visible on any of my TV sets, including the new 62" DLP (which uses 7% overscan, I've determined).
One could eliminate the border entirely on either product by zooming in the resulting video. I rejected that approach early on simply because it introduced further softening and artifacting of the image.
(5) Both are slow. Given a 13.5 second clip, SteadyHand took my PC 2:35 to steady, while DeShaker took about 4:30 of processing for the various steps, plus maybe a minute of manual mousing around (selecting Pass 2, selecting DV avi encoding at the end, removing the 30 frame black leader). The minute of manual labor would be gone if an automated script were available. So even in a best-case situation, DeShaker is about 1/20 realtime. This is with an AMD 2100xp system, so these days one should be able to double the rendering speed on a newish system.
Still, the results are very pleasing. I do note an occasional MPEG2-like minor artifact on the DeShaker results when viewed on the big screen TV that are not present on my interlaced sets. I attribute this to some sort of interaction of the video with the deinterlacing/upscaling function of the TV (the TV has a DLP display of 1280x720 pixels, so it not only deinterlaces NTSC video but also upscales to the higher pixel count).
Bottom line: very, very smooth Steadicam-like results. Not perfect, but very usable for my purposes.