Cool trick for your bike videos, virtual steadicam..

Jonathan in Hiram

Jonathan in Hiram

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I've noticed that a lot of the bike videos posted here are very shaky, I found a trick to fix that a while back.. Here's an example of a video I shot with my digital camera while riding my recumbent on a local trail with my grandkids, the first half is the raw footage and the second half is the same footage that has been stabilized in my computer with VirtualDub and the Deshaker plug in for it.

[youtube]zn_RlsVQeTU[/youtube]

You can download the free Windoze program VirtualDub here: http://www.virtualdub.org/

And the free Deshaker plugin for VirtualDub is here: http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm

VirtualDub is a fairly complex program itself and Deshaker is pretty complex too, there's a fairly steep learning curve to get the two pieces of software working but I think the results speak for themselves.

Deshaker works in two passes, the first pass identifies the motions in the video and the second pass takes them out, once you have the video looking the way you want it to then you can save it as an avi file.

Note that VirtualDub wants avi files only, you can convert most video formats to avi with the freeware Bink: http://www.radgametools.com/bnkdown.htm

My digital camera shoots in Quicktime so I have to convert all my videos..

Enjoy..
 
Thats amazing. Thanks for the post. So it blurrs in the edges during the short gaps where there is missing data..
 
Deshaker actually has a couple of techniques to take care of missing data on the edges, adaptive zooming is one, it will also look for missing data in a number of frames before and after the current one and you can specify how many frames before and after. You can also specify a set amount of zoom that will take care of the edge problem. There are enough settings in the program that finding just the right combination can be quite time consuming but for the most part there are really only a few that you have to change on a regular basis. You can also leave all the edge fixing techniques turned off and you'll see variable width black borders whenever the program is compensating for camera movement, the more movement the wider the borders.

I picked a fairly unsteady video to make this demo with, the better the original video of course the better the job Deshaker does. I have some hand held video that has come out looking like it was done in a Hollyweird studio after processing. I have an old heavy cast aluminum handle that was originally made for a 16mm movie camera that I use with my digital camera sometimes when I'm shooting video, the handle weighs about four times what my camera does and makes shooting pretty steady video by hand much easier.
 
I have some vids from my little digicorder that are worse than the bike vid. Could use this for sure, appreciate the heads up.
 
Heres a quick video of a deshaker demo I did.

[youtube]YWvFG9qlnVA[/youtube]

I set deshaker up to just look at a rectangle that included the horizon and the clouds and to ignore the areas outside this. Very impressive results. Such a cool piece of software.

The Melbourne Solar System ebike videos have all had post-processing with deshaker.

example,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNCfrjCL2L4

Greg
 
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