Is image stabilization possible in post?

Abaddon

Abaddon

Well-known member
I just had some stuff shot with and HVX and the image is really shaky. Is there any way to do any further image stabilization in post?
 
you can do it but at the sacrifice of resolution because the NLE will zoom in a bit on the image.
 
Final Cut Pro 6 does a pretty good job, it's basically been ported over from Shake. It really depends on just how shaky your original footage is, and shutter speed/motion blur is also a big factor in final quality. If you were shooting at something like 1/24 in low light, chances are your footage will have a lot of small "glitches" in it after being stabilized, because you'll still be seeing the motion blur from the camera's movement even though it's stationary.

A nice thing about FCP's implementation of it is you can tweak the stabilization amount (translation and rotation) and it'll tell you how much your image will have to be zoomed to compensate. So you can hopefully work out a decent compromise between stabilization and final image quality.
 
It was shot in 24fps 780pn 180.0 shutter.

For some reason, a lot of the footage is pretty grainy, so if the image needs to be zoomed, that could be an issue.

I do plan on getting FCP 6, so I'll do what i can with that.

What is the stabilization feature called?
 
Smoothcam in FCS2. If you have Adobe, you can get a plugin (I think the demo is actually free, too, and works great) from 2d3 or something... called Steadycam I think... not sure.

It just zooms the image in a bit, cropping off some of the edges to make the middle stabilized. Depending on how bad the shake is, it can work wonders. I used the Premiere plugin last year to make a handheld walking shot look like a beautiful dolly shot during a live event covering and had a lot of people ask how I got the shot. Very handy.
 
just put 2 clips through smoothcam . the shot is stable and subject is centered but,,,, the first clip only zoomed in 2% but the picture ends up all soft. about a 20% loss in res. almost looks out of focus, and not just the moment the jiggle of the clip,but the same through the whole run of the clip. i sure now thatit is a rock solid subject i can run it through another filter to try and sharpen up the clip. am i missing something?
 
Well Smoothcam has to zoom into a shot to stabilize it- otherwise you'd see the edges of the frame as its being repositioned. This is less of an issue on HD footage where you have a larger frame but on SD you can wind up with a degraded looking shot if there's a lot of movement. And it works on the entire shot so if you only need smoothing for a section, cut into the original version after the smoothed section.

Noah
 
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