How to convert these mp4s to make them play smoother?

[Bencuri]

I have a Sanyo HD1000 camcorder. It doesn't have optical image stabilization, so I am prepared for that the video won't be 100% stable, but besides that I noticed as if there would be additional, abnormal jerkiness and jumps in some of the videos that I recorded. It seems as if this was not in connection with the lack of stabilization. It doesn't occur all the time, however.

I attached 2 files. These videos were recorded in 720p. The file named "1.mp4". seems okay to me, the video is more or less flawless. The file named "2.mp4" seems abnormal however. When I am moving the camcorder, there seems to be small, regular jumps in the video, that looks a different kind of abnormality than the one the lack of optical stabilizer causes. What causes these irritating jerkiness and jumps in the video named "2.mp4"? The 1.mp4 video was recorded with 0 zoom, the 2.mp4 was recorded with about 2-4x zoom. Anyway, when I play the 2.mp4 on HDTV, these small jumps are very much visible, the video is not continuous at all, the playback jumps regularly. On computer, this doesn't happen all the time, only sometimes. This is quite illogical to me, but this is what I can see. I use my camcorder connected with HDMI cable to the HDTV to play back videos.


If I record in 1080i, the same thing happens. I attached a 3rd file called "boat.mp4". If you watch it, you can see there are small jumps in the video. In the 4th file, that is named "street.mp4", you can also observe these small jumps in form of sideways jumps. The interesting is that these videos were recorded with 0 zoom. So this is quite strange.

Do you have an idea what causes these strange jerkiness and jumps? They also appear when I play the videos on HDTV. Is it only about that I should use a tripod, or maybe some other problem with the camcorder (the way how 2.mp4 plays seems to be more than just a tripod problem to me, though)? Maybe my SDHC card has an error and doesn't record continuously?

Can these irregularities be corrected now after the videos were recorded? Can you smooth the playback with some filter so that the videos would be continuous and not full of small jumps?

Anyway, just as an additional info: I didn't test it with all problematic files, but I have converted some problematic 1080 60i files to DVD resolution 25i, and when I played back the DVD on analogue TV, the playback was smoother than on HDTV and computer, and there were no irritating small jumps and jerkiness, only the expected shaking because of the lack of the optical stabilizer. But that shaking looked much more natural. Those kind of swings are not as irritating as the jerkiness and jumps that I can see on computer or HDTV on playback. I haven't tried this with the 720p files yet, however.

[jagabo]

I don't know exactly where the jerks come from, but yes, a deshaker can get rid of the camera shake and the jerks. VirtualDub has a deshaker filter, AviSynth has DePan. VirtualDub deshaker example attached. It might be able to get rid of some of the rolling shutter jello effect but I didn't enable the rolling shutter option because I didn't know what value to use.

[Bencuri]

Well, this quality that this deshake.mp4 has is quite acceptable. When I watch it on HDTV, there are no small jumps, etc, the motion is continuous and not dashed.

I have installed the deshaker V3.0 to Virtualdub 1.9.11. If you add the filter, a large window opens with various settings. Can you post a screenshot about the settings you used to convert my file?

After you add the filter, what do you have to do? In what format did you save the file? This part in Virtual Dub is still unclear to me. I would also like to create mp4 or other mpeg, my HDTV can only open those.

[jagabo]

The basic process of using Deshaker:

1) Open Video File
2) Add Deshaker filter, press Pass 1 button to enable the first pass, make any changes in the Pass 1 Parameters box (I used the defaults).
3) Go back the main VirtualDub window and select File -> Run Video Analysis Pass.
4) Go back to the DeShaker dialog and press the Pass 2 button. Make any changes in the Pass 2 Parameters box.
5) Go back to the main VirtualDub window and preview. Repeat steps 4 and 5 as necessary.
6) Select audio and video codecs, set them up, File -> Save as AVI.

I don't remember the exact settings I used but they were something like this:



I saved as huffyuv (lossless) compressed AVI then converted that AVI to h.264 MP4 with x264.

[Bencuri]

Thanks, man! I will experiment with this!

[Bencuri]

I have tested it, and it seems to work, however I will need to experiment more.

But how did you have VirtualDUB to open the mp4? Can you add the script? Also, could youn tell which convrter you used to convert the AVI back to mp4?

Unfortunately I don't know the script for p versions, only for i.

[jagabo]

I used an AviSynth script with ffMpegSource2("filename.mp4", atrack=1) (part of the ffms2 package).

http://code.google.com/p/ffmpegsource/

Or, VirtualDub can open just about any type of file with the right source plugin.

http://forums.virtualdub.org/index.php?act=ST&f=7&t=19488

But some of them aren't frame accurate and don't work so well with multipass processing.

To convert the HuffYUV AVI file that VirtualDub created to an MP4 file I used x264 directly. I have a batch file that contains:

x264.exe --preset=slow --crf=18 --output %1.mp4 %1

I just dragged the AVI file onto that batch file. Current builds of x264 include the ffmpeg source library so they can open AVI (and other) files directly.

It's also possible to frame serve from VirtualDub to x264 to avoid creating a big intermediate AVI file.

[Bencuri]

IT seems this jerky video with small jumps problem is solved. Not 100% sure yet, because I have only done 1 test shoot. But I never made such a good recording yet with the Sanyo camcorder. I purchased a Sandisk Extreme Class 10 SDHC card, and trying that, there are no small jumps and jerkiness in the video. The video is flawless. Of course the handshake is there, but that thing alone doesn't disturb me. So far I used a Fuji Class 10 SDHC, interestingly that should also be a fast card, but you see recording with that produced those problems I wrote about in the starting thread.

I hope in future videos this good quality can remain...

But this deshake filter will be very useful and good to know about. It produces very pleasant output. I will extperiment with it further.