The more shaky the video to start with, the more cropping is necessary to remove the shaky border after stabilization. Cropping means enlarging, and enlarging will make the image fuzzy. Some stabilizers are able to synthesize missing border info to minimize the need to enlarge, but they are not always successful. I usually put up with shaky SD footage for this reason, but stabilizing HD is often worthwhile.

Note also that motion blur in context is often useful, but after stabilization motion blur may become noticeable and annoying.

A couple of months ago, I put together a comparison of stabilization using Mercalli V2. It's not internal Vegas Stabilizer, but might help with the understanding of the zooming issue.

Case1 - Zoom (the stabilized image is enlarged)
Case2 - No Zoom (note the black borders)
Case3 - Border Fill (the stabilizer fills the borders with blurred image imo, looks pretty crappy)
Case4 - Masking Trick - (here I've built my own borders by capturing a still, placed it on a higher level track & masking out everything but the border area. Note, this can only be done when there is no panning or zooming & no movement in the background).



...Jerry

The border fill in Mercalli is pretty dumb. I sometimes see something similar done on TV when SD material is broadcast on an HD channel.

I find New Deshaker to do a better job of border fill. It uses info from adjacent frames to do the filling, not just blur the edge of the current frame.
http://homepage.ntlworld.com/a.edmiston/deshaker.htm

I watched the "Warp Stabilizer" preview video for Adobe After Effects CS5.5, http://www.adobe.com/products/aftereffects.html (bottom left on page, below "What's new in After Effects"), and it seems so simple in that program. Can the stabilizer in Vegas achieve the same effect as in After Effects?

Hello Jerry and all. I recently purchased Mercalli Pro V2 plugin researching stabilizer plug-ins both on this forum and the user manual. I rolled up my sleeves and installed the purchased version and started hacking away for 10 hours straight. I have a deadline of about a week to give as an anniversay gift. The good news is the amatuer videographer that recording my daughter's wedding footage (DV) was for the most part 'salvaged'.

But my heart sank after all the stabilizing on Camera A as soon as dialogue was spoken on the audio channel. There is audio latency of about 1 second. If I turn of all other effects in both clip and track, the audio corrects back to normal ONLY when I disable Mercalli's plugin. Any other plugin effect used whether enableed or disabled does not create the audio issue.

One thing to keep in mind. I have two A/V tracks and use composite mode to weave back and forth from both on the timeline. My rig is using the latest build for Vegas Pro 11 and NVIDIA gpu driver is up to date as well.

Is there a 'preferred' length of clip to have Stabilzer work in? Most are within two minutes or less. I have also experimented with using either glide or universal settings.

Semi-OT: I'm told the project settings are correct in using DV before dropping the media on the timeline and need to render in MPEG-2 but not sure if I should use widescreen or standard definition. I am changing the original format SD to widescreen (still SD not HD of course) via a NewBlue FX plugin. Boy did the resulting resolution ever get fuzzy! LOL

Thanks in advance for your help as always.

homepage.ntlworld.com/a.edmiston/deshaker.htm

Not being satisifed with the VP11 stabilization at all, I downloaded from the above link and tried the script with Vegas 10e 32-bit; it started its job, called VirtualDub etc. but ended up with this error message:

Despite planning for all possible contingencies

Deshaker script had the following error:



System.Application: Invalid media object.

at Sony.Vegas.Media.Validate()

at Sony.Vegas.Media.get_Streams()

at New.Deshaker.EntryPoint.Deshake(Video ve)

at  New.Deshaker.EntryPoint.NewDeshaker(Object sender, EventArgs args)

Interestingly, a deshaken clip (.m2v) has been generated and plays well in WMP - but cannot be loaded into Vegas timeline. Now, this probably is just a minor bug in the code, but I'm no good at Vegas scripting - so please answer these questions for me:

- how do I modify the script so that it's compatible with VP 10/11?
- is it possible to make it x64-compatible, as well?

Thanks

Piotr

EDIT Silly me - of course the m2v is a wrong format for Vegas :)

But, the x64 question remains valid!

"But my heart sank after all the stabilizing on Camera A as soon as dialogue was spoken on the audio channel. There is audio latency of about 1 second. If I turn of all other effects in both clip and track, the audio corrects back to normal ONLY when I disable Mercalli's plugin. Any other plugin effect used whether enableed or disabled does not create the audio issue."Hmmm... I've never seen or heard of Mercalli affecting audio. That said, here's some things to try.

1) Does the latency occur in you render as well as preview? This could be a preview/computer speed issue rather than a Mercalli V2 issue. Try selecting a small area and render with the "Render Loop Region Only" option checked.
2) Do you have the latest version of Mercalli V2? Check Control Panel->Programs and Features. Mine is 2.0.92. I believe 2.0.88 fixed some problems with the Sony Vegas Plugin chain.
3) You might try adding the Mercalli V2 FX (only) and rendering to a new track. Then apply your other FX to the newly rendered event.
4) You might ungroup the audio & video and move and manually move the audio event until it syncs (I really doubt this is the fix, but.... hey it's the brute force approach).
5) Allways follow the following principle of stabilization: When stabilizing video in Sony Vegas 11 using the internal stabilizer or Mercalli V2, best results are obtained when matching properties of source footage, project properties and render properties. If render properties must be different, render to an intermediate or a new track. see: http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=781743

Finally, you say, "I have two A/V tracks and use composite mode to weave back and forth from both on the timeline". I don't quite understand why you would do that, but I'm not sure how compositing might affect stabilization. If you are just multicaming between two video tracks, I don't understand the need for compositing.

...Jerry

Just to try out the new Deshaker I've only now installed the 32-bit version of Vegas Pro 11 - and I can't see my Quadro card working at all (at least not in preview) - is the CUDA acceleration only enabled in the 64-bit version?!!!

If so, it's OK with me - but it's calling for 64-bit scripts and plugins availability even louder :)

Piotr

Thanks Jerry for your quick response.
You wrote:
1) Does the latency occur in you render as well as preview? This could be a preview/computer speed issue rather than a Mercalli V2 issue. Try selecting a small area and render with the "Render Loop Region Only" option checked.

A: That solved the problem. In using the "Selectively Prerender video option... (Shift-M) the audio tracks sync back correctly. (BIG THANK YOU!)

2) Do you have the latest version of Mercalli V2? Check Control Panel->Programs and Features. Mine is 2.0.92. I believe 2.0.88 fixed some problems with the Sony Vegas Plugin chain.

A. Actually my version is more up to date than yours at this time. Current version is 2.0.93 as of November 8, 2011.

5) Allways follow the following principle of stabilization: When stabilizing video in Sony Vegas 11 using the internal stabilizer or Mercalli V2, best results are obtained when matching properties of source footage, project properties and render properties. If render properties must be different, render to an intermediate or a new track. see: www.sonycreativesoftware.com/forums/ShowMessage.asp?ForumID=4&MessageID=781743

A. Thanks for this post link. I am re-reading it again to catch the message I missed. :o)

Finally, you say, "I have two A/V tracks and use composite mode to weave back and forth from both on the timeline". I don't quite understand why you would do that, but I'm not sure how compositing might affect stabilization. If you are just multicaming between two video tracks, I don't understand the need for compositing.

A. While I am using multiple camcorders used by two different amateur videographers, only one of them pressed record from start to finish. The other kept pausing during the wedding shoot thereby making it impossible to sync. Composite envelopes do a beautiful job in this case.

As always, this forum is the most valuable source of information on the planet. I hope this help thread helps others in the future.

@travtek, This may be "old hat" to you, but here's a well-spent 10 minutes: Multi-camera Editing Tools

...Jerry

As others have noted, good stabilization of shaky clips or even of not so shaky clips, is not perfect but properly done it can enhance a video a lot.

The problem with Vegas stabilizer is that it is too simple and does not have enough handles to optimize the results to your needs.

On the other hand, Deshaker Virtual Dub ( which is free) is far superior and with it one can obtain very good results if you have the patience and time to dial in the appropiate settings. However, the default settings can work very well most of the time.

The sine qua non is After Effects CS5.5 Stabilizer, which uses a Subspace Warp. In its default setting it does a superior stabilization which can be further optimized if you choose edge fill or if you choose to crop and pan manually after stabilization.

I went through all of them ( Vegas, Deshaker and AE) and found that AE can do a far better job than I could even manually. So, I now use AE Stabilizer when need and the results are very acceptable. No, it will not correct camera motion blur, but if you know that you have the AE tool, it may be better to set the camera to fast shutter speed.

Where does Mercalli 2 rank in this order?