Boris vs CS4 optical stablizer?

[Joey Foreman]

I think you’re talking about Stabilization via the standard AE tracker. I’ve never used Boris, but I’ll guess that it outperforms AE’s.

However, AE CS4 ships with Mocha AE, a planar tracker, that basically performs miracles, and, unless Boris utilizes planar tracking as well, I’d say it will beat the pants off Boris.

Check it out:

https://www.imagineersystems.com/products/mocha4ae/Mocha_image_stabilization.mp4

[Nelson May]

I looked for some tutorials but couldn’t find any on stabilization. Have you used it for stabilization? If so, does it all you to scale your footage up to cut off the black bars after the render? If it does are the algorithms good?

MBP 2.4GHz 4MB RAM, 30″cine, MAC PRO 2.6 8 core 6GB RAM, Mbox, Neumann TLM-103, FCP HD 7. Pro Tools 8, Adobe Creative Suite, Reason 3.0, Macromedia Studio, ProAnimator, HVX200 with Firestore v4.0

[Nelson May]

I found a Mocha tutorial from Ross Shane. Once stabilized in AE, What would be the best way in increase with image size to loose the black bars?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dq59Ua8THws&feature=youtube_gdata

MBP 2.4GHz 4MB RAM, 30″cine, MAC PRO 2.6 8 core 6GB RAM, Mbox, Neumann TLM-103, FCP HD 7. Pro Tools 8, Adobe Creative Suite, Reason 3.0, Macromedia Studio, ProAnimator, HVX200 with Firestore v4.0

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[Joey Foreman]

I linked to a tutorial in my post.

[Joey Foreman]

The “black bars” are just the underlying background color of your comp being revealed as the edges of the footage shift position to compensate for the stabilization.

If you’re working with a comp size that’s the same as your footage, yes, you will have to scale up your footage some, which will soften it. This is the main reason I don’t use stabilization.

One alternative would be to scale your footage up in a program such as Apple Compressor, using Frame Controls, Better or Best settings for scaling.

Another alternative would be Red Giant’s Instant HD, to scale up to a larger res of HD.

I’ve also gotten pretty good results from Magic Bullet, using its antialiasing controls.

None of these methods is perfect, though. You will lose some quality from upscaling, but depending on your footage, it might be imperceptible.

Just go ahead and increase the scale of the layer past 100% until you can’t see the background, just to see if the results are acceptable to your eye.