Sony Stabilize settings quirkiness/bug FYI

NormanPCN wrote on 3/24/2014, 6:09 PM

I have Mercalli 3 SAL (Merc) but for some reason I decided to test Sony Stabilize. I know underneath it is Mercalli V2, but with far less control.

The sliders are named a little strange and here are the help file descriptions.

Pan smoothing
Drag this slider to adjust the amount of shake (left/right and up/down motion) detection.

Stabilization amount
Drag this slider to adjust the amount of tilt and zoom detection.

Okay, the second one is named unfortunate, but I accept the help file description. The first one is what I want and named similarly to Merc.

Typically in Merc I turn all stabilize off except the left/right and up/down shift. Pan Shot smoothing as Merc calls it. So I set Stabilization amount to 0, and a small (0.1) pan amount and I get a very large crop. Clicking the effect on/off lets one see the crop amount. Cropping is expected in stabilization but this was big for such small settings used.

Okay that sucked but I wondered if there was a boundary condition so I set Stabilization amount to the smallest amount it allowed, 0.01. Voila, I got good stabilization and a very tiny crop as I would have expected.

So if you don't want tilt and zoom adjustments and only the major shift adjustments, then do not set Stabilization amount to 0 to turn it off, but use 0.01.

Set Pan smoothing to get your best stabilization and crop amount compromise.

Comments

wwjd wrote on 3/24/2014, 8:56 PM

Awesome! I never figured out the built in one, yet I do use it all the time on half of the light setting. I'm going to try your discovery right now!

Hulk wrote on 3/24/2014, 11:41 PM

Great tip Norman. Thanks.

Have you ever done any testing on the effectiveness of GPU acceleration with the Sony Stabilizer plug-in? It's listed as GPU Accelerated.

NormanPCN wrote on 3/25/2014, 4:17 PM

Have you ever done any testing on the effectiveness of GPU acceleration

I just tried some quick tests. The analyze phase seems to be a touch slower with GPU enabled. Also, I do not see any GPU load in programs like GPU-z.

As for playback, since I cannot separate exactly what the stabilize is doing relative to any other items the Vegas render and composite engine is doing during play/render I really cannot comment knowledgeably.

I don't know how the stabilize is done, but I can speculate. The analyze phase probably records the specific motion vectors needed to stabilize the video. On playback/render each frame is adjusted on the fly using the motion vector information.

This playback code might be GPU accelerated. Basically you have interpolation from the crop and possible rotations. Both of these are good matches for GPU massively parallel compute.

The analyze phase does not appear to be accelerated and that might be why it is a touch slower with GPU turned on. Probably extra copies of the frame buffer.