Smoothing zooms in an editor

[SCDVD]

Occasionally I asked to help "fix" problems in videos. I have a DV tape from a friend that has some zooms in the video that are not smooth. This creates a distraction from an otherwise good effect. I'm looking for suggestions on ways to "fix" this. Fortunately there is no audio sync issue with these so techniques that affect the timeline aren't a problem. I use Vegas Pro 8 but I assume that editing technique that deal with this problem would be as appropriate in other NLE's as well. I assume that the same techniques could be used to deal with pans that aren't smooth as well. I know there are limits to what can be done. A video shot by Lurch who had too much to drink may be beyond help. I'm just looking for ways to deal with a "reasonable" amount of uneven zooms and pans.

[guns1inger]

It depends on the type of problem as to how difficult it may be to fix. If you are talking about pans and zooms that wobble because they are hand held or on a loose tripod, then a good stabiliser will usually smooth things out. This could be a plugin, standalone app, or even the DeShake plugin for virtualdub or DePan for avisynth.

If, however, you mean smoothing out stop-start zooms and pans, it becomes a lot more difficult. Vegas is probably the best choice I have found for this because of the velocity envelope, but it takes time and a lot of tweaking. Basically it means adding lots of points to you velocity envelope and slowing some parts down while speeding other parts up until you get a reasonably smooth overall effect while keeping the original running time.

[SCDVD]

It depends on the type of problem as to how difficult it may be to fix. If you are talking about pans and zooms that wobble because they are hand held or on a loose tripod, then a good stabiliser will usually smooth things out. This could be a plugin, standalone app, or even the DeShake plugin for virtualdub or DePan for avisynth.

If, however, you mean smoothing out stop-start zooms and pans, it becomes a lot more difficult. Vegas is probably the best choice I have found for this because of the velocity envelope, but it takes time and a lot of tweaking. Basically it means adding lots of points to you velocity envelope and slowing some parts down while speeding other parts up until you get a reasonably smooth overall effect while keeping the original running time.

It isn't camera shake, it's an uneven zoom rate. I will play around with tweaking the velocity envelope to see what I can accomplish. I haven't done anything with this before so it will be a learning experience for me.

The most difficult parts I suspect are areas where the zoom rate of change is uneven. In these areas it would require a point be set literally every few frames. And there is no specific point of reference; it's appears to be more of a trail and error approach. To get a final result that is completely smooth is probably more of an effort than it's worth.