Stabilize without cropping

CDRShepard wrote on 5/3/2020, 4:23 PM

I have a box full of 8mm and Super8mm film that I've been converting to digital to share with my family. Because it was all shot on a handheld unit dragging actual celluloid, it was subject to both the wobbles of the operator and the variance of the mechanism. Vegas has a stabiliser plug-in, but it crops my lovely 1450x730 WS image down to a relative 1075x604 pan-n-scan version of itself. (See image comparison attachment.) In this shot, the stabiliser crops out the house on the left, the car on the right, and nearly all of the sky; it's like looking at the same scene through a paper towel tube.

I can work around this by rendering a stabilised clip, and adding it as a layer atop the source in a new project (one that doesn't recognise the clip or think it needs the effect,) dialing its transparency down to about 50% and using it as a guide for tilt, pan, and rotation (applied by hand to each frame of the original.) When finished, I turn the "guide" layer off, rescale the image vertically, adjust 18FPS up to 30p, apply other effects (color, saturation, brightness/contrast) and render the final. (That's the easy part.)

Of course, the frame of the image seems to wobble strangely around , but you can see everything there is to see; considering this is 50-year-old footage, that's got a certain value to it. But the Stabilise plug-in has no slider or tic box for Do Not Crop, so for now, this seems to be the only way to do this. It's a time-eating PITA, though.

Does anyone make a plug-in that does what I'm doing by hand? Is there a way to get the stabiliser to stop throwing away 40% of my image?

This is Vegas 15 on an HP z840 with 2x Xeon 12-core CPUs running Win10; FWIW, I've been using Vegas since it was still a Sound Forge product. (Though I have - and occasionally use - other NLE apps, there's an expression about "cold, dead fingers" that comes to mind.)

Comments

j-v wrote on 5/3/2020, 4:35 PM

Vegas 17 has a better stabilizer and you can set it your way for cropping a.s.o., that is much better than the old stabilize function in VP15.
Try out youself with the 30day trial.

walter-i. wrote on 5/3/2020, 4:37 PM

Try the trial version Vegas Pro 17 - the stabilization tool has improved significantly
The zoom factor can be adjusted continuously.

edit: j-v was faster......;-)))))

CDRShepard wrote on 5/13/2020, 11:55 AM

Thank you for the recommendation, gentlemen!

I have downloaded and installed VP17 Edit's trial version. The Stabilise plug-in has not changed even one tiny bit. There is, however, an entirely new plug-in called "360 Stabiliser." Though it does not have any controls for zoom or crop, it does something that converts camera-shake into dimensional image compression; the top and bottom of the frame seems to vary asynchronously in size. Imagine projecting the image onto the side of a cone that is constantly changing its radius or height, and then filling as much of the frame as possible with it.

The one slider it has is for "Smoothing," which seems to allow one to vary between "Salvador Dali" on the left (0) to "3 well-soaked tabs of Lysergic acid diethylamide-25" on the right (120). At its zero setting, though not entirely unwatchable, it produces a result much like the first Dr. Hall POV shot from Andromeda Strain directly after he's been hit with the laser (at about 2:06:12, if you have it to look.) If you're not familiar with the classics, it also looks rather like an exterior from Interstellar.

Here are stills of this distortion. Even with this, to see the effect varying with time, you'll have to use your "imagination" (if you have that plug-in.) (Also, please forgive my use of "quotation fingers.")

Both effects must be applied outside the normal effects chainer, so the processing time is not dependent upon the length of the bit I actually want, nor can I get back to the effect control and adjust it to be best for that bit, either. So no gain there.

I have tried cropping the image first (to just the whole frame at centre,) and rendering an interpos where the entire image is matted into the safe zone before applying the 360 stabiliser, without success. Is there something else I should try? Doing this by hand (per the origin of this thread,) seems the only way to solve the original issue, and it's nightmarishly time-consuming.

Alternative: Is there a community of Vegas developers I could work with to create a plug-in that does this? The first step is easy: run the Stabilisation as usual. The second step should also be relatively simple, since it's essentially using a stereoscopic coincidence rangefinder where one of the images is used as a reference, and the other uncropped image - once aligned with it - is the output. Even a modification to the existing stabiliser would be ideal: just make it so it doesn't crop the image down after making it unwobbly!

JackW wrote on 5/13/2020, 12:43 PM

In looking at your examples I'd say the cropping has cost you little. There is vignetting on the original image that you would likely crop out for a start. This would eliminate the building on the left. In terms of the composition the loss of the car on the right is no loss at all. Finally, the center of interest -- the two bike riders -- remains centered and is now stable.

walter-i. wrote on 5/13/2020, 4:08 PM

@CDRShepard
You tried the wrong plugin - see screenshot - (but I only have the German version)

See also : Tutorial Video stabilization
Here it is explained with Vegas Pro 16 - and with the media effect.
In Vegas Pro 17, you can also drag the effect onto the event.

Former user wrote on 5/13/2020, 7:12 PM

Of course, the frame of the image seems to wobble strangely around , but you can see everything there is to see; considering this is 50-year-old footage, that's got a certain value to it. But the Stabilise plug-in has no slider or tic box for Do Not Crop, so for now, this seems to be the only way to do this. It's a time-eating PITA, though.

Does anyone make a plug-in that does what I'm doing by hand? Is there a way to get the stabiliser to stop throwing away 40% of my image?

Download Davinci Resolve and use it's stabilizer. It does what you want. I agree with 8mm footage which doesn't have much resolution better to see all the image or almost all of it with black borders when need be. I'm not saying to learn to use a new editor, but instead use it as a stand alone stabiliser, not an editor. Look for videos on youtube on how to use Resolve's stabiliser.

I looked up the good quality plugin stabiliser for vegas, and it seems to cost $300(LoL) https://www.prodad.com/Video-Stabilization-for-Professionals/Mercalli-V5-Suite-for-Magix-77214,l-us.html#buy just use the free Davinci stabilzer, encode a high quality intermediate video and go back to vegas to edit it how you'd like.