Reducing Camera Shake in Post?

[2Bdecided]

CW,

I've never used scripts in Vegas. You'll have to ask the script's author...
http://www.sonycreativesoftware.com/...ssageID=528354

FWIW it's clearly possible by editing the script, or getting the script to simply pull in the settings from VirtualDub - it's just not something I've ever done.

In VirtualDub itself it's trivial to change the codec. CTRL+P or Video>Compression, and pick whatever one you want.

It's all "AVI" - AVI is just a container format, which can hold anything from 1000MBps uncompressed, to 100Mbps Canopus HQ, to 0.2Mbps MPEG-4!

Cheers,
David.

[CycleWriter]

I'll do more research. From the link you provided it appears I am not alone. It would be great if VDub supported .m2t files because I could then open them up and process them manually and make whatever output choices I need to, but alas...

[lilewis]

OK, I finally got around to playing with this. First, I installed VirtualDub, then Deshaker on my V64 system. No problems there.

CycleWriter,
is your pc an intel Vista 64? If so do you remember which VirtualDub version you installed?

[User]

Some guy having similar probs CW
Check here
http://www.dvinfo.net//conf/showthre...t=39162&page=4
Maybe you can talk to each other.

[CycleWriter]

Some guy having similar probs CW
Check here
http://www.dvinfo.net//conf/showthre...t=39162&page=4
Maybe you can talk to each other.

Very funny. Who do you think Rick Diaz is?

[DaFireMedic]

Very funny. Who do you think Rick Diaz is?

My guess is that he's the most interesting conversationalist you know......

[CycleWriter]

My guess is that he's the most interesting conversationalist you know......

And devilishly handsome, too.

[User]

[Khaver]

I'll do more research. From the link you provided it appears I am not alone. It would be great if VDub supported .m2t files because I could then open them up and process them manually and make whatever output choices I need to, but alas...

Use DGIndex and MPEG2Source in an avisynth script and you can open m2t files in virtualdub. I'm sure there's info for this in the forum somewhere.

[CycleWriter]

Use DGIndex and MPEG2Source in an avisynth script and you can open m2t files in virtualdub. I'm sure there's info for this in the forum somewhere.

Too complicated. I want something that works inside Vegas. I've got too many clips to process. Bouncing back and forth between various programs, creating a ton of intermediate files, learning how to make scripts...all too much work. I have hundreds of clips in this project and keeping track of them is already a challenge. I'll either keep using Deshaker or live with the slightly lower quality of Mercalli. Thanks anyway.

[Khaver]

CW,

In the post I was referring to you didn't mention using Vegas. You said you wanted to be able to open m2t files in Vdub so you could process them manually. DGIndex and MPEG2Source gives you that ability. It would be fairly simple to create a batch file that could process many clips using these. You could even use the HV20Pulldown program as a front-end. Just create new avs scripts and Vdub compression settings. It's not just for 60i to 24p pulldown.

For my own use I even modified the HV20Pulldown program so it adds "INT" for intermediate instead of "24p" to the end of the name of the created AVI file and changed the title bar to "Batch Intermediate AVI Creator Engine(1.0.0.15)". Hexplorer can work wonders. (Hope Steve Szudzik doesn't mind) Now I have avs scripts for 60i to 60p, 60i to 30p, 60i to 24p slo-mo, resizing to 1280x720, saturation boosting or reducing, sharpening, etc. along with the 60i to 24P Pulldown script. The avisynth Depan plugin will even stabilize in one pass instead of the two passes required with the Deshaker Vdub plugin.

[CycleWriter]

CW,

In the post I was referring to you didn't mention using Vegas. You said you wanted to be able to open m2t files in Vdub so you could process them manually. DGIndex and MPEG2Source gives you that ability. It would be fairly simple to create a batch file that could process many clips using these. You could even use the HV20Pulldown program as a front-end. Just create new avs scripts and Vdub compression settings. It's not just for 60i to 24p pulldown.

For my own use I even modified the HV20Pulldown program so it adds "INT" for intermediate instead of "24p" to the end of the name of the created AVI file and changed the title bar to "Batch Intermediate AVI Creator Engine(1.0.0.15)". Hexplorer can work wonders. (Hope Steve Szudzik doesn't mind) Now I have avs scripts for 60i to 60p, 60i to 30p, 60i to 24p slo-mo, resizing to 1280x720, saturation boosting or reducing, sharpening, etc. along with the 60i to 24P Pulldown script. The avisynth Depan plugin will even stabilize in one pass instead of the two passes required with the Deshaker Vdub plugin.

How do those programs make VDub open m2t files? Are they just addons? The whole scripting business sounds way too complicated and cumbersome for me. My head is spinning just thinking of all the clips I have to deal with in Vegas alone. Reprocessing them into even more clips I have to keep track of will explode my brain. I'll look into your siggestion, but it just makes me dizzy.

[racer-x]

How do those programs make VDub open m2t files? Are they just addons? The whole scripting business sounds way too complicated and cumbersome for me. My head is spinning just thinking of all the clips I have to deal with in Vegas alone. Reprocessing them into even more clips I have to keep track of will explode my brain. I'll look into your siggestion, but it just makes me dizzy.

That's OK, it made me dizzy too when I first started out.......actually I'm still dizzy. Anyway DGindex is just an Mpeg-2 decoder that is capable of frameserving to other tools, sometimes with the help of Avisynth (another frameserver / video processor) to make it go more smoothly.

As khaver and I posted earlier, the avisynth plugin "depan" can stabilize footage in 1 pass (real-time on my PC) and is way faster than "Deshaker" plugin for Virtualdub.

Avisynth is not the easiest tool to learn, but it is immensely powerful. Think of it like "The Force" in Star Wars. "Use the force Luke!"

[Khaver]

How do those programs make VDub open m2t files? Are they just addons? The whole scripting business sounds way too complicated and cumbersome for me. My head is spinning just thinking of all the clips I have to deal with in Vegas alone. Reprocessing them into even more clips I have to keep track of will explode my brain. I'll look into your siggestion, but it just makes me dizzy.

Avisynth is a frameserver. It can be used by any program that has the ability to open avs files as media files. Avisynth merely feeds another program the frames of the original clip. When you write a script to open an m2t file with Vdub, avisynth decodes (with the help of a plugin) and feeds each frame to Vdub. Vdub doesn't see it as an m2t file. Then you can process the video like any other media file that vdub can work with natively. But the real power of avisynth is it's ability to process the video and audio before it sends the frames to vdub. It is very powerfull, with many plugins available for it. There is even a 64bit version available.

[CycleWriter]

Can you come over and walk me through it? Thanks for all the info, Khaver and Racer-X.

[Khaver]

Start here: http://avisynth.org/mediawiki/Main_Page

[lobstaman]

Been playing around with Deshaker and imo it blows mercalli out of the water. I converted my m2t to cineform avi then loaded in vdub and run deshaker and it done a great job. Loaded the m2t in premiere and tried mercalli and it stabilized it however it was very very wobbly .. completely unusable. I tried a lot of different settings but still had the same problem. Mercalli done a good job on my reg dv videos from my old dv cam but footage from the hv30 was unacceptable.

[lobstaman]

I just went and took 5 seconds of footage at a nearby lake just before heavy rain started .. I zoomed in at 10x .. left everything on auto and 30p. I was aggressive with Deshaker and had to zoom it quite much in Premiere to rid the borders. The video was crap as it was but deshaker made it usable.

[ame="http://www.vimeo.com/3908675"]Deshaker Test on Vimeo[/ame]

[CycleWriter]

I was equally impressed by Deshaker, but turning a 30 sec. 156mb m2t file into a 7.4gb avi file is just too much hard drive requirement for me.

[lobstaman]

I was equally impressed by Deshaker, but turning a 30 sec. 156mb m2t file into a 7.4gb avi file is just too much hard drive requirement for me.

I can definitely see your reasoning there .. I batch converted some more of my shakey footage to cineform and I'm going to load in virtualdub and run deshaker on it. Bad part is you really can't do any kind of batch processing because every clip is different .. seems like it could be a long painfull process. But atleast it can save some otherwise useless footage.

[Khaver]

You're right about the large files produced if you want good results, but that's the only way to keep good images throughout the capture and editing workflow using an HD camcorder that uses a compressed format for recording (unless of course, you don't need any pre-processing and use the m2t directly in your NLE). Harddrives are cheap these days. Just be thankfull there are codecs that can compress losslessly and we don't have to work with uncompressed, raw avi's(although you can by using proxies for editing and uncompressed for final render).

[CycleWriter]

I think I'm going to compartmentalize this project significantly. That will let me assemble clips into individual project files that I can Deshake, then render to BD mpg format. Then I can drop these rendered files into the main project timeline. Once they're rendered I can delete the Deshaker .avi file and regain my disc space. Correct me if I'm wrong, but those rendered mpgs won't be rerendered in the final project, correct? Isn't that what SmartRender prevents?

[Rambo]

I wanted to start this thread to share my experiences with Video Software Stabilizers and De-shakers and to see what others have found using these tools. I realize it's not of huge interest to most people, but it's of great interest to me who's work involves shooting from unstable platforms like boats, Jet Skis and free floating in water with buoyancy aids.

This first video is a before and after test using Prodad Mercalli.


[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIGq6a2KBuM"]YouTube - Before and after test of Software Stabilizer[/ame]

I'm also doing tests with SynthEyes and I'll post a comparison of the two here in a follow up post.

Has anyone else had good results using other software?

Cheers Rambo

[bmsweb]

Anyone seen this one before. Is this the same as the SynthEyes product?

[Rambo]

Anyone seen this one before. Is this the same as the SynthEyes product?

I'm playing with the SynthEyes product right now, but i can't get close to what those Research guys and Adobe are doing with the 3D warping stuff.

SynthEyes does work on a 3D level and using the lens correction/distortion function helps eliminate "Rolling Shutter or Jello" but it's a lot of manual tweaking to get results like they have.

Love to get my hands on that product, when/if ever it's released.

Thanks for the link.