I've been quite happy with Sony Vegas Pro 12 stabiliser for the past few years but recently it started to become very buggy. The stabilised clip would at some point decide to become extremely erratic despite originally being fine. Often the bug wouldn't be obvious until you watched back the final render.

This pushed me to look at third party plugins again and I decided to fork out for Mercalli V4.

Does anyone else use it?

Could you give me some tips, or share your presets?

I dislike that it seems to have tonnes of presets for action cams and a general 'non fishyeye' option for the rest. Then theres the options for Universal Cam, Sports Cam, Glide Cam and Forensic Cam - what do these even mean?

It just seems to over-complicate the process, and no matter what I choose I find the results to be very hit and miss and not as good as the Sony stabilizer.

The benefits of course are that it applies only to the timeline clip, and is much faster to analyse.

But it's not giving me good results yet...

I have read about users that use it together with edius as plugin and report that sometimes the edius stabiliser does a better job and sometimes the mercalli plugin, I have tried it but was not that overwhelmed by it's results, it was not bad and in some cases a little bit better then edius own stabilser but not worth the quite high price you have to pay for it.

It would appear Mercalli was playing up with me because my project settings didn't match my media properties. The Field Order to be specific. Hope this might be of help to somebody in the future! Seems to be working OK now.

The fact that Sony's plugin insists on being applied onto the whole of the media is a joke. So I need this to work for me!

Perhaps in future Sony will solve this annoyance. It would also be nice if some of the NLE's would offer a way of batch analysing multiple clips at once.

Hi Clive,

I had Mercalli V4 bundled with my upgrade of Magix ProX6 to ProX7, so as the upgrade was less than £60, it seemed like a bargain.

I don't use it often, but seems to be very efficient when I do use it. Having set basic standard parameters a while ago, I just select it if needed, click on 'Analyse' and let it do it's thing, only changing it if I am using the GoPro and want to reduce the fisheye. I don't think batch processing and analyzing would be practical, because some clips would require differing amounts of stabilizing, so as the programme averages each clip, you would over process some clips if batch analyzing was possible.

Roger