Hoping for a little advice on where to start with image stabilisers… I’m using Sony Vegas Movie Studio HD Platinum 10, which does come with an inbuilt stabiliser but no zoom control so I’ve never had a decent result from it- with mtb footage it always cuts the image down to be too small, and there doesn’t seem to be any way to tell it to accept more shake but less zoom.

So… Deshaker, as far as I can tell, has no Vegas 10 plugin. Mercalli Pro, a bit expensive for nobber videos. Other than working on the clip outside of Vegas then importing a stabilized version is there anything else clever I can do?

Depends how pro you want your footage to be.

Youtube has a deshaker thing which seems to do a reasonable job.

A limitation with all image stabilisation is based on how wonky the original footage was though.

Sorry can’t help otherwise I’m a FCP user.

Cheers… It’s gopro riding footage so can be pretty shaky- I really just want to take the worst off it with a couple of short sections, I think my chase-camera-man had the strap loose 🙄 But they’re nice sections so don’t really want to bin them. Pro isn’t on the cards but I like to apply at least a bit of polish.

The Vegas software’s doing a good job of the stabilizing, it’s just going too far and cutting it down to about 50% original size. All I really want to do is tell it “do less!” but there’s no option. Quite frustrating if I’m honest, enough functionality to make it obvious how useful it could be, but not enough to actually do the job.

Maybe a work around is to split the footage into small clips, and apply the stabilization then. You may not lose so much of the picture then.

Smaller clips should help. It’s working out how much to cut by the maximum stable pixels in the overall clip, so the variation will be bigger the longer the clip. You will lose continuity though as the clips will be cut down differently.

They’re about 7 or 8 seconds long. It’s a good suggestion mind but doesn’t work here 🙁 Annoyingly there’s only brief moments of really bad shake so it’s applying an extreme level of stabilization that’s not really needed for 9/10ths of the clip.

Annoyingly there’s only brief moments of really bad shake so it’s applying an extreme level of stabilization that’s not really needed for 9/10ths of the clip.

I’d stabilize the good bits, and keep the other bits as is if they are v short. It’d make a good effect. :Maybe:

Not sure how to make that work with such a short section- can’t really cut a bit out of the middle and the zooms’ll end up different. Maybe I can chop it into 3 super-short clips and manually match the zooms or something…

Some of the best stabilising I’ve managed to do for footage was to run the footage through VirualDub and a stabiliser plugin … can’t remember the name, but if you search some solutions should come up. then with the stabilised footage, you can run it through Vegas.

Yeah, that seems like a good ideal, virtual + deshaker. Was looking for a cheaty shortcut but sometimes I guess you’ve just got to do it properly.

Thanks all!