Help with old shaky 8mm/super 8mm videos

[zfishman]

Hello.

I have some very old videos that were converted years ago to dvd. They contain precious film of my mom who recently passed away.

In several spots the vertical shake is severe. Here is the video (prime example at the 9:00 mark):

https://youtu.be/M_bvRePlX_k

Can anyone suggest methods to reduce the shake? Anything would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you,
Scott

[johnmeyer]

First of all, if your family still has the film, get it re-transferred. That is a very poor transfer, probably done by pointing a video camera at the screen. The difference between what you have now, and what that film is capable of producing is even more than the difference between old-fashioned standard-definition video and HD.

If you want to remove the shake, then you can use any of several stabilizer programs. Depan works with AVISynth and is free; Deshaker works inside of Virtualdub and is also free. Mercalli is a standalone product (although there are versions that work inside of video editors). It is usually the best, but it is expensive.

You may need to do quite a bit of work on your video before motion stabilization will work. If you walk through the video one frame at a time, and you find that you have duplicate frames, or blended frames (which I can guarantee that you do, even though I am not able to advance one frame at a time on a YouTube video), you'll need to remove them.

I obviously didn't watch all 2+ hours of that film, but I did note that some of the jumping looks like it was caused by a projector that had lost its loop. This is very hard to fix, although it can be done. Here is a sample of one such problem I fixed when the jumping happened in the camera (film wasn't loaded correctly) so it was baked into the film:

Restoration of Jumpy Film

If you get a proper transfer, where one frame of film is transferred to one frame of video, this before/after I produced shows some of what can be done:

Film Restoration: Before/After

[super8rescue]

Deshaker in VirtualDub is my go to

https://youtu.be/JltX56MIWn0


edge compensation settings demo that I mention in my deshaker video

https://youtu.be/LzO7kCXWmsw