Stabilizing Shaky Video

[katnapz]

I think there used to be a plug-in for TMPGEnc for this....??

Has anyone ever used any programs to remove/minimize video that suffers from handheld shaking? I'm not talking about portions of the video where the camera is all over the place, just where someone was doing a pretty good job of holding the camera, but was bouncing around some. My understanding is that ways to do this look for common stable spots, then follow those from one frame to another....the minus is that it cuts out the edges of the shot so that if you still want to fill the frame you have to "blow up" the picture some...so suffer from some degredation.
It'd be interesting on opinions from anyone on what they think of this too...is it worth giving up, say, 10% of the picture for video stabilization?

I don't have any projects I'm planning on using this on short term, but I know of a couple tapes I have that I'd consider down the road so feedback would be good.

Advice is appreciated.

[willndmb]

not sure how to do this with a video already shot
but i have some ideas for people taping them
one way to make a handheld better, is to tie a string to the camera with a washer on the end, drop the end down and stand on the washer, pull the string tight
this takes away a huge amount of the handheld movment because you just made a 4 way handheld become 2 by basically getting rid of all poss up and down movement

[irishcrazy2005]

[Initiate incredible dork mode]

This is horrible that I am even mentioning this; however, I can think of one way to do this that is probably not practicle for most. In my research we take images of surfaces with a scanning tunneling microscope; basically we get a bunch of atomic resolution pictures. I then use these pictures over a series of time to track diffusion of molecules deposited on the surface. In order to make a nice automated process, the images need to all be of the same area. So, we wrote scripts in MatLab (which is a matrix based programming language/interpreter) to shift and crop the images to the maximum size that is showing the exact same area. This makes the "movie" steady. That being said, this could theoretically be done with frames of a video. It would take a fair amount of programming, and is probably not practical for most people who want to do this. However, it can be done. Haha, so that was probably all worthless, but I thought that I would share anyhow.

-Phil

[/end dork mode]

[katnapz]

Honestly, there are ways to do it...I was at COMDEX in Vegas a couple years ago and there was a company there showing off their version of it. I also (cough, cough) saw a crack posted in a newsgroup for a program that did it....obviously I didn't get the crack, but I remember the name of the program caught my eye enough that I looked it up....problem is I can't remember the name of it now. Google doesn't really give good returns with an ambiguous search like this so I thought I'd ask here.
The way it was explained at the show was that you point out common "steady" items (they don't move) in a couple frames...and then the software "links" to those spots in each frame after. Of course if you move the camera to a different spot you have to point again...

Also, have any of you ever seen the Bigfoot footage that was shot back in the late 60's/early 70's? The one where the camera is shaking all over the place as Bigfoot walks away into the woods? I saw software like this used on the same footage....the result was the picture was about half the size (lots of shaking going on), but the image was ROCK steady. And once the image was steady you could pretty much see it was a guy walking normally in a big fuzzy suit... :)
Of course I'm showing my age here with the Bigfoot story...

[katnapz]

Aha...thought of a different search term. I searched for "stabilize video" on google and have found a couple hits...one of which is called DeShaker (and it sounds like it's some sort of free plug-in for something)...so I'm going to dig through the hits I find. If anyone else wants to look and provide feedback it'd be appreciated.

[Five]

Aha...thought of a different search term. I searched for "stabilize video" on google and have found a couple hits...one of which is called DeShaker (and it sounds like it's some sort of free plug-in for something)...so I'm going to dig through the hits I find. If anyone else wants to look and provide feedback it'd be appreciated.
deshaker is a plugin for VirtualDub. Go grab VD and the plug and try it out... I wouldn't expect miracles or anything.

good luck!