deshaking video of a plane in a blue sky

[stephen_le_page]

Hi Guys,

I've made a hand held video of a plane flying through a blue sky making awesome jet trails.
The camera's image stability was on, but at full optical zoom, the plane is still moving around by more than 100 pixels overall.
I want the nose of the plane to be the smoothest feature of the video.
I've just tried to use deshaker to stabilise it, but after about 50 attempts, I just can't figure out how to get any improvement.
Have a look:
http://members.iinet.net.au/~le_page/Stephen/Jet%20Trails%20Over%20Cottesloe.divx
OR
http://members.iinet.net.au/~le_page/Stephen/Jet%20Trails%20Over%20Cottesloe.wmv
Any suggestions?
Thanks.

[guns1inger]

The problem is that there isn't enough detail on the screen for DeShaker to do it's thang. If you process through the sample clip you will notice that DeShaker actually does a pretty good job in the last 200 frames or so, when you pan past the trees. This is because there is plenty of detail, and DeShaker can get dozens on motion vectors to work with. For the rest of the clip it can only get 4 vectors, and only some of the time. Even with the threshold set to every pixel, the number or motion vectors remains around 8. Combine this with the fact that most of the motion is fairly gentle, so often no vectors are calculated at all, and basically you get very little correction.

What you really need is a targeted tracker, like the one built into After Effects, so you can tell it to track the plane and the end of the trail, then use this data to stabilse the frame. Unfortunately, for this type of footage, DeShaker is simply the wrong tool.

[zoobie]

or try stacking the frames manually...if you have nothing to do for a few weeks