Hello John,

You can also try the motion stabilisers in Boris RED if you have or are thinking of RED.

It does plugin to Vegas but the motion tracking does not work as Vegas only sends a single frame to the plugin.

If you wanted to save creating AVI's you may be able to frameserve out to RED and then save a project with the tracking data and any other effects you want and then apply that within the plugin - I must give that a go.

Regards, Paul

Videocurmudgeon: Don't use the zoom feature in SteadyHand. Just render the shaky video and import it into Vegas. When you play it, you'll immediately see the black borders moving to and fro. Now go into the Pan/Crop feature of Vegas, and enlarge the frame as needed to hide the black borders. I've found I can get very slick with this feature, and slowly zoom in and out as needed to cover the problem portions while not hurting the resolution of those parts of the video that don't need enlarging. Also, I find I don't need the default amount of correction that SteadyHand offers. I scale the integration time back to 333 from 667, and still get a significant amount of steadying while minimizing the black bands.

The only drawback of digital image stabilization is the loss of sharpness due to the necessary zooming; using the Vegas tools we can choose to zoom in some parts and not in others.

Thanks for the info, riredale! Good idea.

As I look at SteadyHand, I don't see where I can "scale the integration time back" as you described.

J--

Steady Hand--

I have used SteadyHand and Deshaker and found the changing focus problem to be irritating. Even still they do work pretty well. The focus changing is visable on very distant objects within the picture in SteadyHand.
Deshaker tended to give me too much jitter as if it was zooming in and out very rapidly. If your doing any letterboxing the horizontal or vertical corrections must be shut off or the picture travels all over the place like a yo yo. They do help however in some shaky situations that have to be corrected.
Like the People say on these forums---Tripod or optical stabilization---.

JJK

>> Deshaker tended to give me too much jitter as if it was zooming in and out very rapidly.

You can avoid this if you choose "Fixed Zoom" for "Edge Compensation" in the second pass process.

Marco

Taliesin: I can't remember trying that but i must have run off over 30 tests of the same clip, a chopper taking off with different settings on the first and second passes.

JJK

I mentioned it because I had exactly the same problem with my video getting zoomed in and out after having used Deshaker. Till yesterday when somebody gave me the hint to have "Fixed Zoom" selected for the second pass preference. Using this setting now I don't have any zooming no more.
It does not mean you have to have different settings for first and second pass. But "Fixed Zoom" is available in the second pass area of Deshakers setting dialogue only.

Marco

VideoCurmudgeon,

I believe he's referring to the Custom Settings under the Motion Correction area..

I wish the user had control over how much it would zoom in on the image. : VideoCurmudgeon

In addition to the comments already made, I should note that you can control this in Steadyhand by first setting everything up the way you want, and then as the last step, click on "Custom Settings" (found in the "Motion Correction" section of the main screen). You will then get a dialog box that has "Horizontal Pan," "Vertical Pan," "Zoom," and "Rotation." Set Zoom to zero (0). I don't think is the zoom you were referring to, but setting it to zero gets rid of Steadyhand's tendency to "pulse" in and out. If you then click on "Target Window Settings," you'll be able to control the size of the window that Steadyhand uses: Make the window smaller, and you'll zoom further into the picture; make it larger and you won't zoom in as much.

Don't use the zoom feature in SteadyHand riredale

I assume you are referring to the "Video Edge Treatment." If you select "No Edge Correction," you will get exactly the result that you describe. Doing this, and then using the Pan/Crop in Vegas to zoom in and eliminate the borders is a very intriguing idea. I think this might eliminate some of the artifacts that I think Steadyhand introduces when it does its own cropping and zooming.

Thanks for the great tip!

At the risk of being shot I will mention that the new version of Pinnacle Studio 9 has image stabilization. I have only read the reviews but did not try it first hand since I am an ex user of Pinnacle Studio and I haven't had a crash or a hang since since I switched to Vegas :-)

Steve