As I mentioned recently on this board, I've become a Deshaker convert. I shoot a lot of "walking around" hand-held video with my VX2000 as I follow a local choir on their latest tours to Europe and other places. I am as careful as I can be in shooting, and I usually am shooting through a Canon WD-58 wide-angle lens so the motion is even less pronounced. Nonetheless, I was very disappointed to see my results on our new big-screen TV, which, of course, amplifies any motion effects. Kinda like sitting in the front row of the theater as a kid. Thanks, but I'd just as soon pass on those nausea-inducing sensations now that I'm older.
So after comparing the results of using Deshaker with my old standby SteadyHand, I was a happy camper. True, there were lots of buttons to push and knobs to turn in the production of smoothed-out video, but the results were worth it--this is truly the next-best thing to a SteadyCam or similar device. It even does a reasonably good job of filling in the moving black borders that are the inevitable result of the steadying process, though I still use a 3% cookie-cutter frame to mask any remaining "business" at the edges.
But after days of Deshaking much of my hand-held footage (the rendering runs at about 1/20 realtime), I saw to my great frustration that there was a new artifact introduced--a kind of a jpeg-like "mosquito-noise" on the edges of objects undergoing sharp pans. "Darn," I thought (actually I used a stronger word here), "this will greatly limit the usefulness of Deshaker."
This morning was the first chance I had to sit down with a 20-second clip of the offending artifact and try to figure out a workaround. Deshaker has a couple of clever tricks up its sleeve, including the ability to adjust the degree of correction for any portion of a clip during the rendering process. But I tried the obvious adjustments on the Deshaker configuration panel, and still had the artifacts.
Then I noticed that, surprisingly, when I would do a frame-by-frame scroll through the Deshaken image in VirtualDub, the artifacts were absent. They were only coming into existence when I rendered (via VirtualDub) into a DV avi. So I tried doing an uncompressed avi render, and moved that file to the Vegas timeline.
Sure enough, the mosquitoes were gone. I re-rendered that avi into DV avi using Vegas. Still gone.
So my conclusion is that the artifacts are caused by the final render to DV within VirtualDub. I'm using the MainConcept encoder, which I had thought was pretty good. Now I'm off on a quest to find a better DV encoder. In a worst-case I can always compress to Huffy lossless and do the DV compression within Vegas.
I will post some shots later when I can spare the time, but all I can say is that Deshaker is a remarkable tool for anyone trying to get a SteadiCam look with hand-held shots. Since there is a resampling of the pixels, the results are slightly softer than the raw video coming out of my VX2000, but the effect is slight, in my opinion, and the tradeoff to me is definitely worth it for getting buttery-smooth video.
So after comparing the results of using Deshaker with my old standby SteadyHand, I was a happy camper. True, there were lots of buttons to push and knobs to turn in the production of smoothed-out video, but the results were worth it--this is truly the next-best thing to a SteadyCam or similar device. It even does a reasonably good job of filling in the moving black borders that are the inevitable result of the steadying process, though I still use a 3% cookie-cutter frame to mask any remaining "business" at the edges.
But after days of Deshaking much of my hand-held footage (the rendering runs at about 1/20 realtime), I saw to my great frustration that there was a new artifact introduced--a kind of a jpeg-like "mosquito-noise" on the edges of objects undergoing sharp pans. "Darn," I thought (actually I used a stronger word here), "this will greatly limit the usefulness of Deshaker."
This morning was the first chance I had to sit down with a 20-second clip of the offending artifact and try to figure out a workaround. Deshaker has a couple of clever tricks up its sleeve, including the ability to adjust the degree of correction for any portion of a clip during the rendering process. But I tried the obvious adjustments on the Deshaker configuration panel, and still had the artifacts.
Then I noticed that, surprisingly, when I would do a frame-by-frame scroll through the Deshaken image in VirtualDub, the artifacts were absent. They were only coming into existence when I rendered (via VirtualDub) into a DV avi. So I tried doing an uncompressed avi render, and moved that file to the Vegas timeline.
Sure enough, the mosquitoes were gone. I re-rendered that avi into DV avi using Vegas. Still gone.
So my conclusion is that the artifacts are caused by the final render to DV within VirtualDub. I'm using the MainConcept encoder, which I had thought was pretty good. Now I'm off on a quest to find a better DV encoder. In a worst-case I can always compress to Huffy lossless and do the DV compression within Vegas.
I will post some shots later when I can spare the time, but all I can say is that Deshaker is a remarkable tool for anyone trying to get a SteadiCam look with hand-held shots. Since there is a resampling of the pixels, the results are slightly softer than the raw video coming out of my VX2000, but the effect is slight, in my opinion, and the tradeoff to me is definitely worth it for getting buttery-smooth video.