Vegas Pro 10 Stabilizer Versus Mercalli

[Chip Gallo]

I tuned in to yesterday's presentation on VP10 and noticed that Gary didn't have time to talk about the new image stabilizer feature. I had purchased proDAD Mercalli V1 in 2008 and grabbed V2 last week. It operates stand alone as well as plugs for Vegas, Premiere and After Effects. For my purposes (stabilizing video shot by volunteers that may be hand held to edit into more stable footage), Mercalli fills the need and will work with the other tools I have available. Now that the amount of zoom-in is adjustable, I am finding more recoverable footage too (over V1).

Prioritizing 3D features over stable image in the presentation, why? I think most users are interested in presentation quality whereas fewer are worrying about 3D.

[Edward Troxel]

I believe the stabilizer built into Vegas 10 is the same as the one found in Vegas Movie Studio 10 and also believe it is based on Mercalli V1.

[Jeff Harper]

I'm not into or excited about 3d, but it is huge and certainly THE next big thing, whether you and I are interested or not. Everyone has there own pet area of interest. For example, I see image stabilization as unnecessary and as something I don't need.

[Mark Maskell]

i have purchased vegas pro 10 and was excited about the stabilizer until i tried it.
When used it completely washes out the footage, removes sharpness, skews the picture and you get intermittent blurs. My footage looks much much better without it. i have posted my dissapointment to Sony.

[James Binder]

The stabilizer in V10 is VERY basic and only gives you a handful of presents to chose from -- no custom settings. After using it for awhile, I must say, I'm a bit at a loss. I can't seem to stabilize any footage to a point where it looks acceptable. Maybe I need to work with it more...?

[Chris Barcellos]

Using some shakey footage from a T2i I shot hand held, I used the stabilizer, selecting stabilze pan and tilt only. It worked better than the roll tilt and pan default selection. I also select correct for rolling shutter.

This actually has more controls than first realized, but nothing will save you from analyzing the footage to determine what you are trying to stabilize.

This is better than nothing for some quich looks at footage-- at least to see if it is salvageable, in another programs, if nothing else.

[Duane Adam]

OK I give up. How do you apply the motion stabilizer without zooming the clip?

[Chris Barcellos]

All post stabilizers require zooming. They work by readjusting the position of the items that it is keying on. As a result, it needs to expand the edges so the item can be drug back to position, in each frame.

[Jerry Amende]

Originally Posted by Duane Adam

OK I give up. How do you apply the motion stabilizer without zooming the clip?

There are multiple ways of doing this - some good, some not so good. A stabilized video may be cropped and show annoying/moving black borders, however the image itself is not zoomed.

The Deshaker for VirtualDub is very clever, in that it will look forward and backward in the video clip and rebuild the black boarders based upon past and future frames.

Mercalli V2 has an option to fill the black borders with blur - not very pleasing, but it retains the zoom.

Or, you can manually fix this in Vegas for selected clips that do no contain panning or zooming. Capture an image of the first frame of the clip and use this image on a video track above your video. Use masking to cover the areas that would normally show the pulsating black boarders. I used this technique in the following example:

Stabilizing Video with the Mercalli V2 Vegas Plugin on Vimeo

Good Luck!
...Jerry

[Dale Guthormsen]

Jerry,

That is a clever idea about using an outside border mask with screen shot background. funny I have done similar things but never thought about doing that with mercalli.

thanks!!