Tracking in a video? Hard for me to explain

[Masterfly]

I've been recording some clips from concerts without a tripod. It gets a little shaky sometimes, I usually *try* to stay centered on the stage without moving the camera all over the place. I'm wondering, by chance, if there is a plugin or which one of the editors would be capable of setting a point in the video, somewhere in the middle of it, that the camera will track to and stay locked in automatically even though I'm moving around.

The idea would be that it keeps the camera still and looks like I recorded whatever footage I'm recording on a tripod when really I just used a plugin to stop my shaky hands.

Any ideas, possibilities, suggestions?

I'll take any help at this point. Thank you very much.

[MasterP]

There are a few plugins out there that will help with this
the one that springs to mind first off though is steadymove

We'll need to know what application you are editing in though - this'll help narrow it down

After effects does good motion tracking/shot stabilization, however, it's not worth buying a whole program for primarily one effect.

One important thing to keep in mind about stabilization plug-ins though:

The way they work is by anchoring the shot to the track point/points which you specify - they then move the REST OF THE FOOTAGE around them according to the degree of camera shake/movement that goes on.

Doing this will leave your stabilizedvideo with blank bits around the edges where the clip edge has moved away from the edge of the frame - in order to fix this, you need to re-scale the clip

For big shakes, this can be as much as 30-50% (I have horrible shaky hands!) - rescaling will loose sharpness and it may be worth looking into plugins like instantHD if you end up doing this a lot.


Personally, I'd recommend using a monopod to film with - takes up less room than a tripod in the crowd and in your bag, allows you to hold the camera above the people if need be and will take the strain off your arms if you are filming for ages and help prevent a fair amount of shake

[Masterfly]

Excellent! The only one I've got is Vegas.

I'm ok with zooming into the clip a little bit to stop clipping, I'm usually decent at holding a camera but in some cases it can get real bad. Concerts especially.

The monopod is also a good idea, I've never considered one before.

I'm currently downloading steadymove's demo program and I'll see what it can do for some of these clips.
Thank you for the response.