I had to shoot the vows portion of a ceremony hand-held after the inept officiant forgot to ask the bride and groom to face each other, so their backs are to the audience the entire time! I had to dismount camera from tripod and run up behind the line of tall groomsmen to get their faces during the vows. The result is some pretty awful shaky footage.

I've tried SmoothCam within Final Cut and C2 Lock&Load. Both make the footage look like jello.

Has anyone had success with other programs? I've head Mercali is pretty good, but I don't want to spend the money if the result is going to be the same.

I have to say, this is the first totally f***ed up ceremony I've shot in over 10 years so I'm pretty upset about it.

Motion does a pretty good job, but the fact is that shooting with CMOS sensors will give you jello video.

Smoothcam and Motion's Stabilize both work much better when you use the ProRes 422 codec too.

We have found Mercalli to be the best of all but Lock & Load is very good too. If L&L hasn't fixed the footage enough for it to be anywhere near useable then I doubt that Mercalli will be a whole lot better. You will probably have to get creative & try some other way of rescuing the situation. Perhaps a combination of still frames & video or slow motion or use a cutaway to the congregation when the shaking is particularly bad. As long as you have good audio there is plenty that you can do.

I don't have any input on stabilizers, but like Nigel said...There's plenty you can do, just don't beat yourself up about it. Use cutaways, even from different parts of the ceremony, or anything you can. The bride and groom will never notice!

Thanks everyone for the input. I didn't realize Motion had a stabilizer, so I will give that a shot before considering Mercali. The footage was shot on an Ex1 and transcoded to ProRes 422LT.

I normally wouldn't be too concerned, but this bride happens to be a super picky bridezilla type so if anyone would notice, she would! :p