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Stabilising footage without visible tracking points (i.e. manually)
I’m trying to stabilise about two hours of footage of a presentation we had on orbital mechanics. The camera was off the the side a bit, so the image is awkwardly keystoned and off the side of the frame. We had no tripod (sat it on a beanbag on a stool), so the the camera was not really stable and shifted around a bit and the side and bottom of the projected images & video got a bit cut off. It also bounced around a few times whenever anyone jolted the stool.
I can’t just use Corner Pin because the camera shifts throughout the footage, so the distortion is not constant. I can’t use the tracking stabilisation feature, because there are no consistent points to track (the room was very dark, and the images and video often only took up a portion of the screen, so I can’t just track the screen corners, and sometimes one or two of the corners aren’t visible anyway).
Most of the movement is pretty slow, so I could manually pick the points where the corners of the screen should be for several keyframes, and then interpolate between them, and use those points for stabilisation (warp footage from them to the full video size). But I don’t know how to do this, other than to let the stabilisation tracking run (and fail to track anything) and then manually place all four points for every single frame, which is not really possible for two hours of footage! -
2 Replies
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Hi, the best results I’ve seen for that kind of thing is Shake’s steadycam node. Magic Bullet Steady by Red Giant Software does that too (although I’ve never used it), and Boris has a steadiness plugin too, called optical stabilizer.
Hope this helps
PeteRogue Keyframe
Feature Film Compositing -
I do not have OS X, so I could not try Shake. Magic Bullet steady has the same problem as the built in stabiliser (nothing to track for most frames), and Boris appears to be the same sort of software. What I’m looking is for a way to do the stabilisation manually, by picking a the corner points in a few key frames and interpolating the motion between them (the camera motion is fairly slow and smooth, rather than the quick juttering most stabilisation software is meant to correct).
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