I just watched The Girl with The Dragon Tattoo extras and noticed that for stabilization purposes Fincher is utilizing more image than he needs for the film. If the shots are shaky they have access to part of the image outside of the crop area to utilize. Most stabilization programs use this technique. Considering that Red cameras have enough resolution to crop the image and still be HD quality, can the GH2 do this at all? If you letterbox the image, then you obviously have some unused material on top and bottom, but the left and right edges are still needed. Can you realistically stabilize shots in the GH2 and keep them HD quality? If you enlarge the shot a little (in post) to get the left and right edges outside the crop area, is it going to be very noticeable on a television? Interested in everyone's thoughts.
GH2 Cropping for stabilization
- Thread starter jlee462
- Start date
Answer is yes. But, you loose some sharpness and detail, anytime you blow up the image... so its not like the original 1080p pixels.
If there is serious shake, then your talking about blowing up the equivalent of 720p video to fit in a 1080p pixel range. And when you have 1080p beside 720p... you can see a large difference.
All image stabilization software and hardware use a large area to stabilize video.
The real question is, how much do you need to stabilize? Are we talking about a head mounted camera? Skateboard down some street? or subtle hand shake and smoothing out some camera pans?
Most people are very happy with 720 HD video, most people wont see a difference in a blind test. So yea, blowing up 1080p video to stabilize it... your average viewer will never notice it.
If there is serious shake, then your talking about blowing up the equivalent of 720p video to fit in a 1080p pixel range. And when you have 1080p beside 720p... you can see a large difference.
All image stabilization software and hardware use a large area to stabilize video.
The real question is, how much do you need to stabilize? Are we talking about a head mounted camera? Skateboard down some street? or subtle hand shake and smoothing out some camera pans?
Most people are very happy with 720 HD video, most people wont see a difference in a blind test. So yea, blowing up 1080p video to stabilize it... your average viewer will never notice it.
I also found this extremely interesting. A great idea, but I think it's funny people were advertising that the movie was "shot in 4K" and they went to "4k showings" of the film....Fincher basically just used the center 2k pixels for every shot. In the special features disc, you can see each shot is framed using that "center ~2k image." All the extra is just for safety for stabilization or tweaking pans/tilts.
Probably not- aren't most "HD" broadcasts still 720p anyway? You could crop inward 10% and still have higher resolution than most network TV shows.
blazer003
Well-known member
There is a plugin called proDAD Mercalli that I purchased and am very happy with that automagically does this. You can tell it how much you want it to crop in percentage, and what method to use. It can keep the image perfectly stable and let you do the panning, or, as I do mostly, just let it make choices for best stabilization. And it has an option for keeping the camera dynamic which keeps the camera moving as realistically as possible when you do have too much shake. However, as mentioned, you start shaking the camera too much and jello becomes quite obvious.
You do loose a bit of your resolution, but for many of my handheld shots, just loosing 5% of the pixels smooths it out considerably, and you'd be hard pressed to see the difference from my other uncropped footage.
You do loose a bit of your resolution, but for many of my handheld shots, just loosing 5% of the pixels smooths it out considerably, and you'd be hard pressed to see the difference from my other uncropped footage.
Tim Joy
Veteran
I do a lot of stabilization on shots from my RC heli.
Warp Stabilizer In AE cs 5.5 will also 'synthesize' the edges to a certain degree so it doesn't need to zoom as much.
I found that I could zoom in to 150% on the GH2 frame before it started to look worse than the 7D/T2i/60D resolution at 100%! (this is with the hack of course)
Warp Stabilizer In AE cs 5.5 will also 'synthesize' the edges to a certain degree so it doesn't need to zoom as much.
I found that I could zoom in to 150% on the GH2 frame before it started to look worse than the 7D/T2i/60D resolution at 100%! (this is with the hack of course)