To shoot in 4K and stabilise, or shoot in 1080 on a stabilised camera?

peterh337 wrote on 12/14/2018, 4:01 PM

Only the top action cams have stabilisation at 4K and those which have it, do it optically, by magnetically moving the sensor around.

On one I have, Sony X3000, I had to disable it (with epoxy resin!) because it was badly affected by the slightest vibration. So 4K is unstabilised, while 1080 is software-stabilised (using accelerometers to pick off the active part of the 4K-sized sensor).

I am going on a trip where I am taking an X1000 which has no stabilisation at all at 4K, and has the above software stabilisation at 1080. So it is similar to the X3000 now.

I want to render to 1080 anyway, so why shoot at 4K?

I need to do lens correction, which replicates pixels, and doing it 1080 to 1080 does blur the image.

And - this is the main question here - because the 4K source will be unstabilised, I want to try the stabiliser in Vegas 16. That must obviously be doing cropping. You cannot software-stabilise 4K to 4K.

I suppose one will have to try it and see how good the Vegas stabiliser is...

It is for a ski video, which is a notoriously difficult thing to stabilise. Most of the videos on social media are accordingly unwatchable.

Comments

Kinvermark wrote on 12/14/2018, 5:37 PM

Answer: Best is to shoot 4k on a stabilized camera. :)

In camera stabilization (or stabilization by gimbal) is better than software as it reduces artifacts like rolling shutter & fine detail strobing (from sharp motion) that are not readily repaired by software. Having said that, I typically "clean up" many camera stabilized images with software stabilization and this does involve some (small) amount of cropping. Cropping 4k is still OK (up to a point) because it is rarely noticeable to the viewer ( I am not talking about cropping half your image here; more like 10%.)

If I had to choose in camera stabilized 1080 vs post stabilized UHD I would choose the first. For a good ski video I think you need a gimbal or maybe one of the new GoPro's if you want that kind of look.

Former user wrote on 12/14/2018, 7:16 PM

From examples I've seen here, the vegas16 stabilisation is not very good, it also doesn't support rolling shutter correction. You might want to try Microsoft Hyperlapse Pro if you use hyperlapse effect although due to development ceasing it only includes camera profiles from 2+ years ago & yours is not listed. It can work really well using a camera profile on advanced. Hyperlapse Pro has been free since 2017

You would only use it on 4k & with a camera profile & advanced smoothing.

AVsupport wrote on 12/14/2018, 11:14 PM

I find better outcomes with in-camera and gimbal stabilization.

peterh337 wrote on 12/15/2018, 12:54 AM

Yes, great results are obtained with a stabilised camera, but in this case I don't have a choice.

I have the DJI Mobile thing which stabilises a mobile phone and that works well, except the product itself is poorly implemented. For example the battery life seems to be about 10 minutes... The DJI Osmo works a lot better.

peterh337 wrote on 12/15/2018, 4:05 AM

Can Hyperlapse Pro be obtained in a version without the watermark? The "PAY" link on their site is now dead.

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/product/computational-photography-applications/microsoft-hyperlapse-pro/

Former user wrote on 12/15/2018, 4:23 AM

Technically you have to request a key. https://hyperlapsepro.zendesk.com/hc/en-us/articles/115010695707-Hyperlapse-Pro-Key-Availability-Issues

However everbody gets the same key, so I'll list it here, but understand if a mod decides people shouldn't be posting keys even to software you can no longer buy.

6NQYH-7DV6T-GY9BH-HTHPC-YKPCM

peterh337 wrote on 12/15/2018, 5:06 AM

Thanks :) I have downloaded the trial exe and saved the key.

It looks like it is a generic mp4 processor, with optional support for some action cams. I will give it a go and will report on the results.

Former user wrote on 12/15/2018, 5:22 AM

In my experience it's great for taking edited portions from stabilised hyperlapsed video, but generally not good enough to stabilise a single long shot without editing as some sort of computational graphical error will show up and ruin the shot. It can be superior to Prodad Mercali V4 which is one of the best stabilisers for Vegas, athough it doesn't have the granularity of options

peterh337 wrote on 12/15/2018, 5:30 AM

V16 came with various add-ons including something called Prodad Respeedr 1.0 and Respeedr 1.0 Start. I haven't tried them yet. Looking them suggests they are just slow motion programs which presumably interpolate frames (otherwise, to do a 10x speedup with a 50fps target you would need to shoot at 500fps). There doesn't appear to be a Mercalli stabiliser, unless the built-in one is that. I can't find where the "start" one came from.

Dexcon wrote on 12/15/2018, 5:49 AM

The full version of ReSpeedr 1.0 offers both slo-mo and speedup, and has a choice of frame-blending or optical-flow (or auto) as part of processing the video, The stabiliser in ReSpeedr seems to be a basic version of the 'universal' selection from Mercalli but without any of the 'settings' fine-tuning available in Mercalli..