Words can't describe how appreciative I am for all the replies and great info you have all given me!! Todd-AO's result would serve my purposes and Robert Johnston's render using Topaz Video AI would also work well for me.
I am a bird photographer using 960mm of effective focal length handholding. This video and others like it are spur of the moment things to share on social media. This Red-tailed Hawk was being bombarded by a Blue Jay so I wanted to catch it. Using a tripod wasn't feasible due to possibly scaring the bird. Todd-AO, how much $$ is Resolve and Robert Johnston, how long did your render take? Thank you all again!!
how much $$ is Resolve
Great news ... the basic DaVinci Resolve version is free: ttps://www.blackmagicdesign.com/au/products/davinciresolve
The paid Studio version is much more aimed at the high-end professional market which many enthusiast/semi-pro editors won't really need.
Though I have the paid version, I'm fairly sure that stabilisation comes with the free version. As its free, it doesn't need a free trial version.
Why is Resolve free? Because Blackmagic Design's principal income is from it's highly lucrative TV equipment sales.
I should add that editing in Resolve is a completely different experience than editing in Vegas Pro - first off, it's compartmentalised into different editing functions - and FX are added using nodes which is an alien concept compared to Vegas Pro. But it's not hard to access stabilisation using the 'Inspector' window so in that regard it is quite straight forward to use.
Dexcon, how great!! Thank you ever so much!
Robert Johnston, how long did your render take? Thank you all again!!
@Sneddy I think I remember seeing 20-some minutes. I guess I could do it again. It took 18 minutes and 55 seconds. (Intel Core i7 10700k @ 3.8 GHz, Nvidia GeForce RTX 2060 SUPER 8 GBytes). There's an option to reduce jittery motion in Topaz that really makes the difference. With just basic settings with autocrop it took 1 minute 41 seconds. That's nothing to see.
Robert, Thank you very much for all this.
Robert Johnson, I have a trial version of Topaz Video AI and haven't come close to getting the version you shared. Do you recall your settings? Thank you and everyone for all the input ~ I'm deeply appreciative.
I opened up Vegas 10 Pro and rendered a ,wmv from a .avi of the Hawk video. I picked the setting for the most camera movement and came up with this result: Here's the link if interested:|
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r_NrGWgOg6UNavNBAGdoUMbaIlt25_WL/view?usp=sharing
@Sneddy The only settings I changed were to Stabilization. Exporting as ProRes let's you see the progress better than the other video formats. Afterwards you can convert the ProRes to mp4 in Vegas.
I opened up Vegas 10 Pro and rendered a ,wmv from a .avi of the Hawk video. I picked the setting for the most camera movement and came up with this result: Here's the link if interested:|
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1r_NrGWgOg6UNavNBAGdoUMbaIlt25_WL/view?usp=sharing
@Sneddy That's really good keeping the hawk's head in the scene most of the time. You must have found WARP in Expert mode in the video stabilization fx. I played around with it a couple times and got really good results with hawk.
Robert, that was with Vegas Pro 10!! For some reason, the software team way back then made it easy to get good stabilization results (and there are very few parameters to adjust). I'm going to try Topaz Video AI again but I get dreadful results compared to yours. I have the latest version in trial mode. Thank you and others for your help!
@Sneddy You can get really good stabilization in Topaz, but I noticed that the blue-jay has disappeared when the option to remove jittery motions is enabled. And without it enabled, the results are shabby.
Here is one last attempt at stabilizing. I had to do some minor editing in Vegas after running it through DaVinci Resolve Fusion, Planar Tracking-Steady. https://1drv.ms/v/s!AvEeirjEFWKUgdw24fzpg8kU3aZ9Vw?e=GVTmtG
Robert, what a superb job that did ~ Thank You So Much!!