David,

I know we lose resolution when removing shake from a video with 3RD party products like Mercalli.

I downloded a trial version and installed in in PP CS4, then applied the anti-shake effect (mercalli) to remove handheld shakes. The video was impressively stable and when I rendered it out using cineform again it looked pretty good, but I can't tell how much quality loss has been done.

My question is, how much degradation am I getting by taking a cineform intermidiate and appliying effects, then rendering/exporting it out with the AME using cineform codec again?

I was impressed with proDAD's Mercalli, I only wish they had a stand alone application to just remove shake.

Thanks,

Rick C.

Nothing your will every see -- why you use an intermediate format.

Thanks David.

Rick,

If you decide to purchase the entire CS4 Suite, you will also get After Effects CS4, which comes with Mocha for AE. Mocha is a technically impressive planar (2.5D) tracking system:

Imagineer Systems - Products (http://www.imagineersystems.com/products/mocha/)

Once you learn it, you won't want to go back to any point tracking system for image stabilization or anything else. BTW, Mocha works fine with Cineform AVI files.

J

Jay,

I already own the complete Adobe Production CS4 suite. But I did not know Mocha was included.

I guess I am going to have to install and play with it. Is this hard to learn? Mercalli is a simple drag and drop effect and seems to do a good job.

Thanks,

Rick C.

No, it's not hard to learn the basics. But it's so powerful, that you really need to study the tutorials to master all the fine points:

http://www.imagineersystems.com/support/mocha/tutorials/

Imagineer Systems on Vimeo (http://vimeo.com/imagineer)
(This Vimeo channel contains user-generated examples and tutorials)

After personally bumbling along for years with most of the Windows-based trackers (Mercalli, Deshaker, AE's built-in point tracker, etc.), I was shocked at how well that Mocha did with difficult tracks. The free version of Mocha is already installed with CS4 and you should have a shortcut to it in the Windows Start Menu:

Adobe After Effects CS4 * Tracking and stabilizing motion (http://help.adobe.com/en_US/AfterEffects/9.0/WS3878526689cb91655866c1103906c6dea-7c5ea.html)

The free version that comes with CS4 is 1.x. There is a new version (2.x) on the Imagineer website and the upgrade from V1 to V2 was selling for something reasonable a while back.

Jay,

After evaluating Mocha, I came to the conclusion that it is a great tracker tool. However, I think Mercalli is still faster, easier, and the results are quite good. It is almost brainless. I am only talking about motion/stabilization removal, not tracking.

So, I think Mecalli is still worth the $ 119. It runs on PP just fine, while, Mocha only runs on AE.

I will keep playing with them, but so far I am convinced that Mecalli will be a good addition to my workflow for those cases where I need to remove some shake from the footage.

Rick C.

I have both, so I won't disagree. What you'll find is you will eventually run into a stabilization issue that Mercalli will not handle and Mocha will.