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  1. I'm currently trying to stabilize select shots in an anime using Sony Vegas and its native stabilize feature. It works well when there is no movement of the characters outside of their facial expressions and/or mouth, but anytime they move, it tends to focus on the foreground as opposed to the background sometimes and causes the picture to shift. Is there a way to get it to focus on the static background specifically? Or is there another plugin or tool that I need to use that would be better at this?

    I've attached a couple clips which outline the problem perfectly. The first clip is of the original footage. The second clip is with the Sony Stabilize filter applied, with "Pan Smooting" and "Stabilize" pushed to the max (any other variation of these settings produces more or less the same results). As you can see, it's mostly fine until the big red guy walks into the frame and it shifts a bit. If the filter were to only focus on the static background (i.e. the sign) then I don't think I would have this issue. Is there a way to trick it into doing that? Again, I feel like I may need a slightly different method to properly achieve my desired results. I am open to suggestions.

    Any help is greatly appreciated, thanks.
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    What would do it is the DeShaker plugin for VirtualDub, because it allows you to select the bit to stabilise and you could avoid the space the big red man walks into.
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  3. Originally Posted by ArtOfLosingMFZB View Post
    Or is there another plugin or tool that I need to use that would be better at this?

    It's not just translation, rotation, and scale with foreground object(s). There are issues with warping, flicker . This is typical of many older cartoons . Even if you "stabilized" it perfectly according to the background in terms of T,R,S - ignoring the foreground characters - parts of the frame will still move in different directions due to the warping . Deshaker has a "rolling shutter" fix that might help with the warping, but a better approach is probably Adobe Warp Stabilizer . When WS is used alone, there is residual noise/flicker on the ground (that is supposed to be static) that you can treat with temporal smoothing or deflickering filters . But you have to be careful with temporal smoothing, because they can cause "ghosting" or blending of frames at higher strengths.

    I don't know of any free equivalents that do similar things as WS ; but there are deflickering and temporal smoothing filters in avisynth and vdub
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  4. You might try downloading the Mercalli standalone trial to see what the full-featured version can do. It is probably more money than you want to spend just to stabilize an old cartoon, but it will at least show you what is possible. The Mercalli standalone is a pretty awesome piece of work.

    As already stated by others, Deshaker does let you define a rectangle to use for the stabilization vectors. You can tell it to only focus on things insdie the rectangle, or only focus on things outside the rectangle.

    The third thing to try is really, really small settings. You are, after all, stabilizing something that is already, more or less, stable, and are only trying to remove very slight errors. For gate weave (the typical theatrical film errors caused by the film not coming to rest in the camera and/or projector gate at the same place as the previous frame), the errors are only a few pixels. If you use anything other than the smallest possible correction values, the software will try to stabilize other things, and will end up introducing more new artifacts than the ones it removes.
    Last edited by johnmeyer; 22nd Apr 2017 at 19:44. Reason: added "standalone" to differentiate from the Mercallli Vegas plugin; later, typo
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  5. I tried DeShaker and produced some pretty good results, though I did notice the warping of the ground that you were referring to, poisondeathray, which wasn't a big deal to me, but I'm blown away by what you were able to achieve with Adobe Warp Stabilizer. It looks fantastic, almost seems like magic. I guess I'll have to seriously look into switching over to Premiere Pro.

    I've heard of Mercalli and it might be worth looking into. If Mercalli's Vegas plugin is able to give me results as good as Adobe Warp Stabilizer, then I'll consider it just because it would be easier to not have to transfer all of my projects into a new editing program.

    Thanks for all of the help, everyone, I appreciate it.
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  6. Originally Posted by ArtOfLosingMFZB View Post
    I tried DeShaker and produced some pretty good results, though I did notice the warping of the ground that you were referring to, poisondeathray, which wasn't a big deal to me, but I'm blown away by what you were able to achieve with Adobe Warp Stabilizer. It looks fantastic, almost seems like magic. I guess I'll have to seriously look into switching over to Premiere Pro.

    I've heard of Mercalli and it might be worth looking into. If Mercalli's Vegas plugin is able to give me results as good as Adobe Warp Stabilizer, then I'll consider it just because it would be easier to not have to transfer all of my projects into a new editing program.



    I wouldn't base video editing software purchasing (or subscription) decisions based on stabilization features

    My favorite for general use stabilization is Mercalli. It's excellent for things like consumer video, hand held video . Probably better than Warp Stabilizer in most cases. It's very fast and has good CMOS correction modes.

    But your example here is what I would call not "general use" stabilization. There are additional compexities in this scene. WS in that example was actually used in default "subspace warp" mode, fully automatic without user intervention. It has a bunch of modes /settings , and you can even edit /remove track points that skew the calculations. But it is slow - one of the slowest stabilizers out there

    There are different categories of stabilizers, and sometimes one is better suited to handling certain problems or scenes than others. They are just different tools you can use. Pros/cons to all of them. Sometimes you might have to use even more complex solvers, some with user intervention , or incorporate some other types of trackers and stabilizers - it all depends on the scene specifics.
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  7. poisondeathray, I am trying to replicate what you did with that shot in Premiere Pro, but I'm having trouble. I can't seem to find anything more than Warp Stabilizer in Premiere itself. You mentioned adding deflicker and temporal smoothing filters as well, and I was able to find an anti-flicker setting under the motion controls, but I can't seem to find any temporal smoothing filter that gives me the desired effect. Did you perhaps apply the temporal filter and/or deflicker filters outside of Premiere?

    Apologies for the necro-post.
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  8. Originally Posted by ArtOfLosingMFZB View Post
    Did you perhaps apply the temporal filter and/or deflicker filters outside of Premiere?

    Apologies for the necro-post.
    Yes, outside of PP. IIRC , it was avisynth with ttempsmooth
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  9. I was getting ready to delete the test clip, but quickly looked at it again. If I were to work on this clip, I most definitely would first remove every single duplicate frame. Trying to stabilize something that actually doesn't move for 2-4 frames at a time will NEVER WORK. So, I'd write down the exact length of the original video. I'd then decimate the duplicate frames, either by using TFM/TDEcimate, or using simply detection like I use in my FillDropsI modification of MugFunky's original Filldrops script and then feeding that to TDecimate. I'd then perform all the restoration steps (stabilization, Deflicker, etc.) and then re-introduce whatever pulldown is needed using the generalized pulldown script on doom9.org that woks with any arbitrary frame rate conversion (i.e., you can go from whatever frame rate results from the decimation, even something like 8.9847 fps, to any final frame rate, like 23.976, 25, or 29.97).
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