Testing conditions for Video Stabilisation software!
My last post, a general mediation on the Apple Macbook Air, Final Cut Pro X, and editing video while you are waiting attracted a reasonable number of comments. Stabilisation seems to be a hot topic at the moment, especially considering that it is one of the planks that Adobe’s new After Effects CS 5.5 is standing on. The piece of video I used to illustrate my recent post was a challenging piece for any stabilisation technology, considering that I was hand holding an iPhone 4, on a windy day, walking backwards on a beach!
In order to demonstrate what’s possible, I ran the same footage through the following tools:
- iMovie 11 on the Mac
- A demo ProDAD Mercalli V2 plugin for Premiere Pro CS5, hence the diagonal lines
- After Effects Warp Stabilizer in CS5.5
One of the techniques used by stabilisation technology is to aggressively crop the clip as it repositions it in the frame to counteract the camera movement. As a result of this, it’s a little tricky matching up the resulting “zoom” level on the different clips.
My own personal favourite is the Warp Stabilizer; while they all had warping and weird jumps at times, After Effects seemed to do the best job to my untrained eye, and all with default settings!
If you have Final Cut Pro X, it would be cool if you could download the original video clip here and run it through the stabiliser on default settings!
