Deshaker: a video stabilizer plugin for VirtualDub

[Jon P. Inghram]

http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm

Found this handy plugin yesterday, it does a great job at steadying video shot with my Canon S3 IS.

[Brian Ellis]

Sounds interesting. I recently did comparisons of 3 other deshakers. None of them were brilliant. If I find time, I may try this one.

[Brian Ellis]

OK, have had a quick look with standard PAL DV type 1. First impressions with default settings:

1. On landscape clips with "normal" camera shake on a wide angle shot. Results seem OK, at least as good as any others I've tried. Panning is better than competitive products.

2. On clips with 3 major parallax planes: it struggles, trying to decide which plane to lock on. SteadyHand is a tad better but this one may be tweaked for better results, given more time.

3. Telephoto shot with animal moving behind bush: hopeless Again, tweaking may give better results if I could understand what to tweak.

4. Audio was completely buggered up on all trials.

[Jon P. Inghram]

Didn't have any problems with audio besides the delay it uses to make up for VirtualDub filters not being able to access future frames: it buffers a certain number of user configurable frames, the text at the beginning in the otherwise empty frames indicates how many ms to delay the audio in the interleaving menu to syncronize it. If you mess around with it's various settings you can get some really wierd "panoramic" effects too. I'll post a video or two when I get home from work.

[Brian Ellis]

OK, I've done a simple test with a quite shaky 2-D subject. At http://www.bnellis.com/msp8.1/shaketest3.wmv you can see the results, showing the same scene 5 times:
1. original, un-retouched
2. Ulead Anti-shake, set to max shake attenuation
3. Fizick De-pan set to default (the red line is because it's a demo version)
4. SteadyHand, set to default
5. VirtualDub + Deshake, set to default.

I'll leave you to draw your own conclusions, but look at what happens with respect to the title, in each case.

PS Where was this taken?

[Jon P. Inghram]

I had pretty good results with it, I'll and put a sample up this evening.

Looked like an art museum to me, that close enough?

[Jon P. Inghram]

Ok, here's a couple videos taken with my S3 IS before and after using Deshaker (compressed with XviD):

http://members.cox.net/rotareneg/egret.avi

http://members.cox.net/rotareneg/piledriver.avi

It works alot better if you fiddle around with the settings, but considering the price it's not bad.

[Brian Ellis]

Looked like an art museum to me, that close enough?

Nowhere near close enough It is in the basement of one of the heathen-proselytising buildings of the Church of the Latter-Day Saints (Mormons) in Salt Lake City, Utah!

[Brian Ellis]

Unfortunately, couldn't view them as I don't have the Xvid codec and WMP said it couldn't find one.

[Jon P. Inghram]

I figured everyone had XviD these days, try http://www.koepi.org/xvid.shtml for a compiled download or http://www.xvid.org/ if you feel like compiling it yourself.

[Brian Ellis]

No, I've seen no reason to have DivX or Xvid or suchlike, as I normally just work on DV footage and output it on DVDs. However, I did the necessary.

Can you please tell us your settings for the deshaker? I haven't had time to go through the possibilities, yet.

[wkulecz]

Quite impressive with the egret. Took otherwise sea-sick inducing footage and made it usable. I've not had good luck with various versions of virtual dub in the past, but next time I've handheld shots I need to try to salvage, I'll keep this in mind!

+1 to mentioning what settings you've tweaked over the defaults.

--wally.

[Jon P. Inghram]

For the egret, on pass one I set scale to full and use pixels to all, and set "Discard motion pixels that move n pixels in 'wrong' direction" to one. On pass two I set edge compensation to none, checked "use previous and future frames to fill in borders" and "extrapolate colors into borders", set previous and future frames to 60 (if I remember correctly,) set all motion smoothness settings to -1, and all max correction limits to 99.

That made the plugins first pass scan more accurate and to ignore motion in any direction other than the whole average. The second pass settings told it to keep the image fixed "at all costs" without any motion, even if it makes huge gaps, and fill the gaps at the edges with past and future frames and to interpolate any left over gaps.