COMMENTS ON MERCALLI VIDEO STABILIZING PLUG-IN
David Ruether
| Recently
I have been using the ProDAD
Mercalli Expert
video image stabilizer video editor plug-in for smoothing hand-held
camcorder footage (which works in many different programs). It works quite well if the footage is fairly steady to begin with, if
reasonably high shutter speeds are used while shooting with the
camcorder, and if some presharpening is applied to the footage. I put
all other FX earlier in the string of filters, then the sharpening (I often
use "0.250" in Sony Vegas Pro 8), and last the Mercalli stabilizer
so that only one compression pass is needed for an
MPEG-2 HDV clip before exporting it to the final video. This program has many presets (often with
peculiar descriptive names due to poor translations ;-), but it is
very effective with a wide range of conditions - and its previewing is
very fast (especially if RAM previewing is used in Vegas). Oddly, the
samples on the Mercalli web page are poor, with the stabilized footage
always looking noticeably softer than the original even though the
samples are quite small. If it weren't for having tried the downloadable
trial version, I would not have bought it. The HDV results were softer
than the original, and somewhat cropped, but since the Canon HV20's VFs
crop anyway, and since presharpening works well for almost completely
offsetting the effects of the dropping of half of the scan lines during
processing, who cares "about th' tweeners" when the final footage looks so
smooth...? ;-)
Some frame grabs and a YouTube version of "THE CHICAGO BEAN" are here. |
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