Rescuing horribly shot video

Laurence wrote on 2/17/2005, 9:29 AM

My wife runs a non-profit foundation which delivers backpacks filled with school supplies and goodies to needy kids in South America. The last time she went, I stayed home with our children and she took the VX-2000 with her. Her uncle ended up shooting the footage of the distribution. I thought that with the VX-2000 it would be easy: just set everything in auto and point and shoot. Boy was I wrong!

Here I sit now, with about two hours of captured footage of beautiful subject matter, but horribly shot video. I absolutely HAVE to do this because it's my wife and it's really important to her and her work.

Here's what I'm dealing with:

1/ Handheld stuff shot at a distance with a lot of camera shake.
2/ Lots of shots where the autofocus was accidentally turned off.
3/ Lots of dirt on the lense.
4/ Lots of dark forground shots against a bright background.
5/ A couple of dozen stills saved on a CD at 640 by 480 resolution.

Here's what I'm finding so far:

The VirtualDub "Deshaker" plugin for Vegas is absolutely amazing, but incredibly time consuming. I can get some steady looking shots if I just take the time.

Spot's idea of two layering the footage with itself, sharpening the top layer, and then adjusting the opacity of the top layer gives me results that are making me hopeful that I can salvage at least some of the out of focus shots.

Does anyone have a good idea about how to handle video that is too backlit? Actually any "how to rescue badly shot video" tips and techniques would be appreciated.

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Comments

RichMacDonald wrote on 2/18/2005, 12:05 PM

>The problem is though if you do a clip in amongst many clips after you delete those thirty frames the clip is thirty frames smaller than it started.

Nope. I think its in John Meyer's tutorial, but inbetween pass 1 and pass 2, append a 30 frame dummy clip. Then you'll get the full length...actually 30 frames longer, but you trim that bit to bring it back to the right length.

But I hear you about aligning things back up in Vegas. The best approach would be to trim that clip in Vegas then add as a take to the original, but you can't do that afaik, see this old thread

JJKizak wrote on 2/18/2005, 12:12 PM

I'm not getting it. I want 30 frames of the original clip not an appended dummy clip.

JJK

Laurence wrote on 2/18/2005, 12:31 PM

In the VirtualDub audio interleave options you can put in an audio delay value. I put in 2002 ms and save it along with the Deshaker filter settings as a VirtualDub setup. It works great and the audio seems to line up perfectly with no fuss.

RichMacDonald wrote on 2/18/2005, 12:55 PM

> I'm not getting it. I want 30 frames of the original clip not an appended dummy clip.

You will get 30 frames of the original clip.

Deshaker delays everything by 30 frames, right? So if you do nothing, the first 30 frames will be junk (to be deleted) and the total length of the clip will be the same length as the original. So you'll lose the last 30 frames of the original.

Now say you append 30 frames from some dummy clip in between pass1 and pass 2. (I have a 30 frame clip. It can be anything as its just to "fool" the system and will not show up in the output.) The result is a new clip 30 frames longer than the original. You'll still get the initial 30 frames of junk which you delete. That clip is now the same length as the original and will include the last 30 frames of the original as processed by deshaker The content of the dummy clip does not show up in the result because it is now the 30 frames that deshaker blew off.

Note: I have two 30 frame dummy clips, one with audio and one without, because virtualdub can only append "like" clips with the same number of streams. So if your input has audio, use the dummy clip with audio, and vice-versa.

JJKizak wrote on 2/18/2005, 2:21 PM

OK. I found the John Meyer instructions.

JJK

Laurence wrote on 2/18/2005, 9:50 PM

I just bought the Main Concept DV Codec today. It seems to render the second Deshaker pass a little more quickly than the free Panasonic one I was using up until now. VirtualDub has become such an important part of what I do, I felt it was a good purchase.

RichMacDonald wrote on 2/25/2005, 8:10 AM

>Deshaker is just so time consuming though when you have to correct so many clips! I need a batch fileable Deshaker big time!

Laurence, do you still need this and how soon?

The problems I alluded to with virtualdub crashing on scripting have been solved. So you can batch deshaker right now. Slightly awkward but doable. And pretty easy to write a vegas script to make it convenient, but that will take a little time.

Email me if you need help.
rmacdonald at appliedreasoning dot com (today)
rich at clevercaboose dot com (this weekend)