John Meyer has a great guide to using Deshaker at:
http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/articles/deshaker_guide.htm

I'm wondering how this'll work with HDV, not that anyone should be shooting HD that way, I suppose VD will cope with an uncompressed AVI.
If you're downsampling to SD and shoot a bit wider than you normally would that'd give these kinds of programs a bit more 'space' to work with.
Bob.

>* Deshaker - Plugin for VirtualDub (free, but I am getting some noticeable distortion in the video)

What kind of distortion? You should be able to find ways to eliminate this.

1) If you're zooming the result to fill the screen, don't, as you'll definitely lose detail. Just like any zoom loses detail.

2) If you don't zoom, your results are *as good* as the original, except for the junk on the edges. Remember that your TV will trim 10% of so of all edges, so you won't even see all/most/much/some of this junk.

3) If the junk extends throughout the picture (i.e., deshaker lost its mind and calculated a movement that is impossible to compensate for), then you have to go into "advanced" mode and play with the settings to eliminate this. Or you just trim the junk bits, which can be an editting nightmare, but c'est la vie.

To answer your question, I've never used Arcsoft and I was never a fan of Steadyhand. Deshaker is worth the effort, IMHO.

I've got to agree about VirtualDub. I referenced Spot's Vasst article above and gave it a shot. VDub imports the file seamlessly, and I export the deshook file using MainConcepts DV codec for use back in Vegas. (I tried using the Huffyuv lossless codec, but the files were huge.) Using the settings explained in the article, I'm very happy with the results. Darryl

>(I tried using the Huffyuv lossless codec, but the files were huge.)

So huge that they bought vegas editting to a standstill for me. (Even for vegas, its a little time-consuming trying to navigate around a 100GB file :-) I don't have the mainconcepts dv codec, so I use the panasonic one. This alters the color significantly, so I have to add a color balance filter back in vegas.

"So huge that they bought vegas editting to a standstill for me."

Hmmm. Frankly Huffyuv is quite indistinguishable to my system - 1.7 P4 w 1 gig RAM. C drive OS at 60 gig, 7200 rpm with video on external USB 2.0 250 gig, 7200 rpm Maxtor drive. I just don't care for the file size.

The MC DV codec is excellent. I've taken to outputing VDub, Particle Illusion, Bluff Titler, ULead Cool 3D, and DVD2AVI in it. Drops seamlessly into Vegas and retains excellent quality. A few $$$ well spent IMHO.

Darryl

I tried out the demo of Dynapel SteadyHand and it seemed to work ok - so i bought it.. Dissapointed later when i discovered if you have any clips with camera flashs (which are usually the most important shots with weddings) the flash totally throws the software off and the resulting clip has a huge 'jerk' in it.

It does help out at times on some other clips..so long as the original footage doesn't have any major sudden jerks (or cam flashs)

thing is though, the quality.. well.. its slight.. but you can definitly see the difference ..

I typically only use it on shots that i will use in a music-vid style segment where style effects are ok.... After i stablize it, i bring it in to vegas, put a copy of the track directly above it, apply gaussia blur to top track and drop opactiy to like 50%... gives it a 'soft focus' effect which helps mask the drop in image quality from SteadyHand.

Though SteadHand won't help you 100% of the time.. it can save a shot here and there.

I think DeShaker works reasonably well. I used on some in-laws video and seemed to stabalize a lot of footage. The camcorder had Electronic Image Stabalization turned on, and the problem with that is the sudden jerks in the video (as the image reaches the extreme of tracking) was something that DeShaker couldn't handle well. I tried to cut those those sections out.

>>...if you have any clips with camera flashs...totally throws the software off

Oh, yes! Isn't that something? I once did a graduation ceremony with SteadyHand; Tons of flashes! I did not realize the picture flipping deal until after several hours of encoding steady-ed footage.

The whole picture does a 360 degree or so spin!!! I had to fix a bunch of those once; a very, very time-intensive evolution.

Also, you don't want to use SteadyHand on any analog video with a date/time in the corner.

The image will be "stable," but the date/time moves all over the place!!!

Really weird!