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Have you seen Mercalli V2 yet?
A couple of folks had sent me emails asking if I had tried Mercalli V2 yet yet so I bought the upgrade to my V1 copy and I gotta say, this is a “must have” plug-in for your kit. It even works with the 64-bit version of Vegas Pro. They have been busy little engineers over at proDAD.
I’ve got some hand-held “socker mom” footage that is very shaky and zoomed all the way in (you know what I’m talking about) and I did a compare against Mercalli 1 & 2 and version 2 keeps a LOT more of the footage in frame. I don’t know how they did it but it doesn’t crop nearly as much as the original version and the results are outstanding. They have this mode called “Glide Camera” that just smooths out all the motion so that it’s silky smooth. The locked down camera mode is rock solid too. I am very impressed.
I have no affiliation with popDAD at all. I just wanted to let people know who were asking. This one’s a keeper… Go for it! 😉
~jr
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4 Replies
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John,
Did you also compare Mercalli v2 with the optical stabilizer or the motion stabilizer from Boris RED? How do they compare?Theo
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Did you also compare Mercalli v2 with the optical stabilizer or the motion stabilizer from Boris RED? How do they compare?
Yes. The motion tracker in Boris RED is a Point Tracker and it is only useful in situations when you actually have a point to track! Mercalli is a different tool than a point tracker (more like BCC Optical Stabilization) and while you can use a point tracker to stabilize footage, it has limitations that don’t affect Mercalli.
The footage I used was a football game zoomed way in with the camera bouncing wildly. I did try the footage in RED using Motion Stabilizer but every point that I selected eventually went out of frame and RED completely lost the track. This causes you to stop the tracking at that point and select another point, then continue tracking. Then you have to do all the zooming yourself to remove the black borders left by the stabilization. An hour later you might have something useful. Mercalli is one click and the job is done. Absolutely no comparison between the two. Point Trackers like in Boris RED, After Effects, etc. can’t handle the kind of stabilization that Mercalli does. That’s why Mercalli is a plug-in to After Effects as well.
I also tried the BCC Optical Stabilization with RED and it did a good job but then I had to play with the Scaling amount to get rid of the borders because the edge handling doesn’t do this for you like Mercalli does. Scaling works fine until the camera makes a real jerky movement and then you need to start keyframing. Mercalli V2 has a new “Avoid Borders” feature that will adjust the balance between large borders and less stabilization. It’s a brilliant concept and works well to minimize zoom.
Also, Mercalli is a plug-in in Vegas. RED cannot track in Vegas because you only get one frame of video from Vegas when you’re in RED. This requires you to load the footage again and set up the tracking. After a dozen clips this gets old fast. With Mercalli you just drop it on a clip, press the analyse button and in most cases your done. It’s a very easy and productive workflow.
For me the bottom line is that Mercalli is one click and the job is done and with V2 it’s even better than before. Well worth the money for the gain in my productivity if you ask me.
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
http://www.vasst.com -
I made a short video of Mercalli V2 if you’d like to see what it can do.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uajXCD34Hok
~jr
http://www.johnrofrano.com
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John, thanks for making the video. It looks indeed very convincing.
Theo
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