New technique to make shaky cam videos stable
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Stumble ThisThis could make YouTube and Sift viewing a lot more pleasurable!
Computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and software giant Adobe have developed a technique that mixes 3D reconstruction with optical illusion to turn distinctive wobble of handheld camera footage into the smooth glide of a Hollywood tracking shot.
The process starts using off-the-shelf software called Voodoo Camera Tracker that can reconstruct a camera's path through 3D space from a video sequence.
Using that as a reference, the software then tries to distort each frame to create the way things would have looked were the camera to have been on that perfect, smooth path. -New Scientist Article
Computer scientists at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, and software giant Adobe have developed a technique that mixes 3D reconstruction with optical illusion to turn distinctive wobble of handheld camera footage into the smooth glide of a Hollywood tracking shot.
The process starts using off-the-shelf software called Voodoo Camera Tracker that can reconstruct a camera's path through 3D space from a video sequence.
Using that as a reference, the software then tries to distort each frame to create the way things would have looked were the camera to have been on that perfect, smooth path. -New Scientist Article
http://www.digilab.uni-hannover.de/docs/manual.html
http://www.videosift.com/video/Bruno-Interviews-Ron-Paul
http://steadycam.org/
Neat, but did you know you can also build or buy your own steadycam on the cheap?
http://steadycam.org/
Yes, that is a nice solution, but do you really want to carry such a weight with you all the time? Many of the fun clips on YouTube were made in a spur-of-the-moment way, and it would be unlikely for those people to carry big steadycam equipment with them.
X Stableize footage.
It does? All I've seen are utilities that track fixed features in the video, then either fully stabilize the shot (for when there's no intended camera movement) or apply some type of gaussian filtering to the tracking data to weed out the random shake, then simply moving each frame around by the negative of the amount of shake motion detected. Of course you have to crop the footage afterwards, since the edges of the image will move inside the frame, and this won't remove motion blur, but usually it works fine and doesn't produce the artefacts shown in the video.
"current software stabilizes video by combining multiple frames"
It does? All I've seen are utilities that track fixed features in the video, then either fully stabilize the shot (for when there's no intended camera movement) or apply some type of gaussian filtering to the tracking data to weed out the random shake, then simply moving each frame around by the negative of the amount of shake motion detected. Of course you have to crop the footage afterwards, since the edges of the image will move inside the frame, and this won't remove motion blur, but usually it works fine and doesn't produce the artefacts shown in the video.
You took the words right out of my mouth
That is all.
Wait, that's not all. The software doesn't look like it's much of an improvement on the tools available now. it seemed that the first shot they stabilized was much tighter after the stabilization. I could achieve the same end product in After Effects 5 years ago. Also, they're saying in a few years time the amateur videographer can buy the software to make them look like a pro. How about you spend 15 minutes during those few years, save yourself the price of the software, and figure out how to hold a camera steady. It's really not that hard, really.
I love handheld in films. It creates a sense of reality and immersion that I think is great. Children of Men is a great example. Saving Private Ryan overall as well. Well composed shots that are simply handheld. Many films have had handheld shots over the years. Alien part 1 had a good number of handheld shots in it. Aliens as well. A bazzilion other films.
This is different from shaky zoomy crazyness. Paul Greengrass and others do tend to use a lot of long lens shakyness that can be a tad overboard. Michael Bay transformers action as well.
No one seems to understand this now though. Everyone jumps on the "i hate shakycam" wagon the moment they see a handheld shot. I don't want handheld to go away.
There is no fucking reason for shaky "hand held" shots unless we are supposed to be watching footage from a camera that is part of the story, such as documentary footage. If there is no camera in the story, then the viewer should not be "aware" of the camera. The footage should be clean and semi-omniscient, like the narrative voice in a book. Novels are not presented in broken cursive with bad spelling, and movies should not be presented in unstable hand held shots.
If you need a lot of flexibility in an action shot, get a steadycam. It provides a sense of immediacy and proximity, and doesn't aggravate. Use it!
Do they have something which can make my friends cool on video
LSD.