Suggestions on shaky video

[ckl_88]

I've been googling for about 3 hours looking for a utility that will help me fix some horrible video.

I recently went on a cruise in Hawaii and shot some night video of a lava flow going into the sea from the deck of the ship. The ship was pretty far from shore so I had to use max zoom on the cam. (12X). Needless to say, with the ship rocking and my hands shaking, the video turned out to be barely watchable if you don't easily get motion sickness. I mean, you can see the bright orange lava and steam, but it's not stationary (ie. centered) so your eyes are continually following it around.

I've downloaded deshaker and virtualdub and played with it for a couple of hours, but I can't seem to get the object of interest (the bright orange lava) centered on the video.

I know there is a program out there that can do this because I saw a demo video of it(before and after examples) a long time ago. Basically, the video is shows a cam. tracking a missile to it's target. The before video has the missile all over the screen and is barely watchable. The after video has it steadily centered...although it had problems around the edges with missing video information. I just can't seem to remember where or how I found it.

So my question is, is there a program (free or otherwise) that would accomplish what I'm trying to do?

[edDV]

Unlikely, but a talented editor person can probably optimize what you have. It would require field by field salvage.

Future reference. Use a tripod or monopod or sandbag to stabilize the camcorder. Ship motion is damped (slow and predictable). Shaky hands are not (x-y and circular). Zoom is worse.

[Alan69]

I've used deshaker once or twice, to fix hand cam footage of a small aircraft landing on a lake, cam was shakey and so was the aircraft once it hit water.

It's a complex operation to remove shake, especially if your object is moving and not 100% stable. If both moved from one frame to the next, which moved? Did the object or the background move, or both?

Deshaker has a crazy number of settings, and for a reason, to try and sort everything out by changing settings. Some of the settings seem backward, when you change them they won't affect the output the way you expected by their description. It takes a tremendous amount of trial and error and many many test runs to figure it out enough to start getting ok output.

But likely it can do what you need, at least good enough, and better than anything I've heard of that isn't pro equipment or hand editing frame by frame. If you like I can hunt up the raw footage and end result I had, still not perfect and likely deshaker could do better with more practice. But it was acceptable. And it also took days of playing around with the settings spread out over two weeks, so isn't an instant thing, but was kind of fun to do too.

Alan

[ckl_88]

Thanks! I found a utility called Steady Hand from dynapel that did what I wanted on that given video clip. Only thing is that the trial version puts an image right in the center of the screen and basically covered up the entire area of interest so all you see is a black screen with the logo.. haha, I guess it is working since every so often steam from the lava appears from behind the logo.

I will keep searching to see if there any better ones.

[Ron B]

Run the footage in slow motion.

[ckl_88]

That's a great idea! Thanks.