Reduce Camera jitter on DV tape conversion to DVD

[SCDVD]

I have been given a DV tape of a school function from a friend who has asked me to convert it to a DVD. The problem is that the camera handling was pretty bad and there is a lot of camera jitter. Are there any effective editing tools to reduce this?

[redwudz]

Try VirtualDub and a deshaker filter, it might help: http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/articles/deshaker_guide.htm

[greymalkin]

deshaker is good..but be ready to wait and wait and wait.....:P

[lordsmurf]

Steadyhand and Steadymove are two more, but I could never get ANY of them to work good. It seems they always add just as many problems as they remove.

[dvd3500]

I have always used DeShaker. Especially if you crop and resize afterwards it works well. Sometimes people think the results are bad but always look at the source...

[dipstick]

I've had great success with Deshaker filter in Virtualdub. It takes some getting used to and render times can be quite long depending on CPU power, but the results can be very good.

A freind of mine went on a fishing trip to Alaska with an El-Cheapo dv-cam and shot some great but very shaky footage of bears feeding in the river. The footage shook so bad, it was virtually unusable. I ran it through Deshaker and slowed it down to 50% speed and the results were truely incredible. That bear footage ended up being the best part of his video.

[SCDVD]

Thanks for the input on Deshaker. Magix Movie Edit Pro 11 has an image stabilizer function with adjustable parameters. Has anyone used it? If so, how does it compare to Deshaker?

[lordsmurf]

Panning and rotation is a problem. If this is simply jitter, motion-noise filters can help. Saying "the camera handling was pretty bad" is sort of general.

How about some exact details?

[SCDVD]

Fortunately, there isn't much rotation. Most of the problem is jitter. In the few places where the camera motion is greater (mini pan), I am going to leave it alone. Even if it could be "un panned", I would have to crop the picture too much. Since you do this a lot Lordsmurf, I know you realize that there is a time spent versus what is accomplished aspect to this. If this were a commercial task, the time spent in tweaking and redoing would justify charging quite a bit for the amount of time spent. In that senario, it would probably be a thankless undertaking as well becasue it's virtually impossible to truly fix what was done wrong to start with. But a customer who is unaware of the limitations of a "fix" could have unrealistic expectations. In that sort of situation, no one winds up happy. But this little task is for a close friend. I have explained that I would attempt to improve but not fix their video. I'm just looking for the best tools and methods to make it better, not fix it.