If you can find a copy, Icarus was free. There've been a few discussions and opinions about some fairly cheap prog. in this forum so do a search. On the high end, you can choose between a small house and the software - well at least a new car... AE I think comes with a cheaper version of this sort of prog. as a plugin.

What all these prog. do is track motion, usually locking onto stuff that's always there in every shot and stationary, like the edge of a wall, tables, trees, that sort of thing. Then it figures out how much those objects have moved from frame to frame, and more or less moves the entire frame so these tracked objects match up again. The quality of your results depend on how many stable objects you have to track in the video, how much the video moves, and sometimes how much time you want to spend working with the software to fine tune things.

JJack,

You might want to take a look at this standalone:

DynaPel SteadyHand 2.2

Because the process of software image stabilization involves frame-by-frame cropping, a significant part of the image border area is cropped in order to achieve stabilization. Hence the need for resampling in order to get back to a standard frame size in pixel dimensions. Vegas should be good at resampling your image to achieve frame size, so an image stabilizing plug-in for Vegas would be a handy thing. But I don't know of one. I haven't tried the DynaPel stabilizer, but I have a lot of footage that needs it.

-- Seeker --

Seeker.....great minds think aliike. That's the same link I posted too.

have you used it yet? I haven't gotten around to running the demo.

Kameronj,

No, I haven't used the DynaPel demo either. I should, 'cuz like I said, I have a lot of footage that needs stabilization. Also, I need to get a monopod and tripod and stop some of the dizzy camera stuff at the source. I am even thinking of making some sort of dolly.

-- Seeker --

there is a motion stabiliser in Boris Red. Next month Red 3GL will be shipping which will be available as a plugin set.

I have not tried the Red stabiliser but you do get a lot more along with Red.

PAW

I am a long time user of Dynapel and its a great product. A bit of advice--What the program does is take the first couple of frames of a shot (when the assumption is that the camera is basically still) and uses that to control movement in the rest of the shot. So if the beginning of the clip is very shakey, it wont do much. Try to find the first moment where the camera is still and render it to a new track, cutting out all the movement before that.

I think you will be very happy with this very reasonably priced product. I think it works better then the image stabilization in AE.

There is a plugin for VirtualDub which is for free. And VirtualDub itself can be used as a plugin in Vegas, for free too.

Marco

I've used Steadyhand a lot too. Only drawback is that you need to enlarge the image slighty to get rid of the black frame, and that means a slight loss in sharpness. But Vegas makes frame sizing so easy, you can first do the Steadyhand pass and then go through your steadied video, changing the frame as necessary with keyframes.

Steadyhand soaks up a LOT of computer power--I recently steadied a 20-minute segment, and basically just left the computer to do its thing overnight.

The other problem with steadied video is that no program can do anything with blurry video. In other words, since the camera is moving quickly in the first place, the steadied video will still show a blur, because that's how it was shot. It will be steadied, but still somewhat blurry.

Best bet is to shoot clean video!

There were a LOT of comments and pointers posted here in the last year concerning SteadyHand. You might wish to do a search on DynaPel and SteadyHand in this video forum to get a few hints on HOW to use it, and when, and what to expect. There are quite a few quirks, but experimenting and reading about them can help a LOT.

Borix Red 2.5 is now being discounted in anticipation of the release of Boris 3 GL. The discount is several hundred dollars. I even got an ad from:

www.academicsuperstore.com which is selling it for ONLY:

Get this, ONLY $595.00, including shipping, which is hundreds less than the non-academic price. Buy Red now, you get a Free Upgrade to 3 GL, and you can avoid ANOTHER $300.00 "upgrade" to 3 GL in June. This is a product that "lists" for around $1500 and will be going up with 3 GL.

In other words, I expect that Red 3 GL will be at least $200 higher than 2.5, whether academic or retail version. Buy the discounted 2.5 not, save even more. *But not enough.*

Dynapel Steadyhand generally works well for me (get ver. 2.1 or 2.2 - lower versions were buggy). As was mentioned, it does zoom the video out to compensate for shakes so it can soften the picture quite a bit. But it really does stabilize shakey footage quite well.

Steady hand also works well for me and will also reduce the amount of
judder in your final product.

JJK

You can check out http://members.aol.com/HuberMM/index.html for a program called, strangely enough, Video Stabilizer. it comes with a Premiere Plug-In but it can be used as a stand alone. I am using version 2.5 and it is actually up to Version 2.6, I never have had any problems with 2.5. You set the areas to stabilize and it will stop along the way if the area you marked goes out of frame and ask for a new area.

One trap I've fallen into is leaving my camera's digital stabiliser on with shots I know are going to be wobbly. It tends to grab and then release when it realises it cannot keep up and at other times adds a jerk at the beginning of a pan. Add to that by having it on I'm wasting pixels and hence resolution.

For a cheap solution someone down here in Australia designed an ingenius bean bag like camera mount. It will mould itself onto almost anything and has special beans to get a lot of the vibration out. The trick to it is its got a graduated filling with metal beads in the bottom it hold it down. Great for sitting a camera on a dashboard etc.

"someone down here in Australia designed an ingenius bean bag like camera mount"

I'll have to play around with making one - Sound Useful... OT, something useful I've found are these big, spring loaded, sqeeze clamps that often come on cheap fans. Ones I've got have a simple swivel mount with a handle/toggle headed bolt same size as tripod mount.

farss,

"One trap I've fallen into is leaving my camera's digital stabilizer on with shots I know are going to be wobbly. It tends to grab and then release when it realizes it cannot keep up and at other times adds a jerk at the beginning of a pan. Add to that by having it on I'm wasting pixels and hence resolution."

That is an excellent suggestion! I have definitely got to adopt that and turn off image stabilization before pans. I am not certain the pixel-wasting thing is a factor for me, because I thought my CCD had extra border pixels to use for the stabilization process.

-- Seeker --