Thank you so much John for taking the time to do this tutorial, I will follow your exact steps and see what happens

I am jumping up and down right now John! What you did was perfect and the outcome was perfect you saved me so much stress and time. I can't thank you enough for the time you took to make my tutorial. I have seven historic reels to restore for our club and now I am on my way thanks to your kindness and generosity to help me!

If seven projects are the same John, how do I replicate this first project to avoid going through all the set up steps?

Understand PAR, DAR and the idiosyncrasies of the way Vegas sets PAR for media. 1440x1080 is a "special case". I'd just start over and do it sensibly from start to finish.

"I'd much rather do it right from the beginning than shoot the bugs in failed attempts." he said, as he starts scanning all his slides for the second time after refining his process.

Totally agree John, that's what I'll do. Rework is a bear. You have been extraordinarily helpful. Thank you so much

Here's is a test render John. Almost 90 year old piece of 16 mm film. Thanks so much for your help.

Glad you’re making progress. In spite of the title of the web site, vegascreativesoftware, I’m more of an archivist than an artist.

The footage looks great! I think a little stabilization is all it needs.

Thanks. I agree that a little stabilization is needed. I've played with Vegas pro stabilization in professional mode and found the crop factor and some stabilization artifacts a deterrent but I probably just don't know what I'm doing :) John Dennis, do you use stabilization as an archivist? If so, what is your process? Thanks

I agree with @Musicvid that stabilization would be desirable. And yes, a little bit of the image will likely be lost to eliminate the wandering top and bottom black borders due to stabilization.

There are heaps and heaps of historic footage videos on YouTube that have been stabilized, converted from hand-cranked possibly around 16 fps to 25/30/50/60 fps using motion optimization (optical flow), and colorized. As just one example, see To be fair, most would have originally been filmed in 35 mm.

Stabilization is a bit tricky in that each stab program works a bit differently - have a look at Scrapyard Films comparison from a couple of years ago involving Vegas Pro 17 and Mercalli: Each was better at some tasks than the others. Stab in BorisFX's Mocha Pro is different again in its plusses and minuses.

The Shade Tree Archivist responds:

I don't have a process for stabilization aside from what's in Vegas Pro.

I have always had good luck using the stabilization that comes with Virtualdub. It is old software, but still functions well. Unfortunately the formats it supports are limited so it might not be useful for most these days.

@johnmeyer not only invented Deshaker for VirtualDub, also being used in Happy Otter Scripts, he is a grand master of archiving old footage. See his Youtube channel here.

I too am an archivist, but I concentrate on historic photos and manuscripts. Just finished publishing a 400 page book for the grandson of a Russian author, who grew up and wrote in the pre-revolutionary period and through WWI.

Thanks for your advice. I took your advice and used Vegas pro 18 stabilization professional mode and created a side by side comparison -left side stabilized and right side non stabilized - seemed to work well.

Nice work! Youtube also has its own Stabilizer you could test.

@John-McKean maybe a little quality loss, but far easier to watch. Thanks for sharing.

Agreed. It may just be the crop factor with the added zoom with less pixels represented

Crop factor and a bit of blurring caused by pixels being realigned maybe.