Stabilizing Footage
by Alan Tonn
on
Sep 14, 2008 at 10:40:54 pm
Hello All
I need a little help with stabilizing some footage.
I have had some success with some footage that I have tracked and stabilized, but occasionally and currently I have had trouble tracking footage.
I was wondering if someone can answer some questions.
First, what are the 2 boxes around a point? Why 2 boxes? What does each square around the tracking point signify? What does it do when I make the boxes bigger? How much distance should I be putting between the inner box and the outer box? Why?
Second, should I track position, rotation and scale all together, or seperately? If I track one at a time will I get better results?
Third what should I do when there is little contrast and I can't get a good track? Is there a way to use a filter to isolate an element in the video and then track that? For instance if I was to get a persons glasses to stand out by using some filters, and then track the filtered footage, would that give me results?
If anyone has any suggestions, please post them. Thanks in advance!
Re: Stabilizing Footage by Chris Wright on Sep 14, 2008 at 11:22:24 pm
There's an outside box for max search track, inside for actual tracking pixels and a cross for the actual x,y pixels you can offset so you can choose a good track and just offset the position you want. A bigger outside box takes longer but tracks better. Distance between the 2 boxes varies, small movement=small inbetween distance, large movement in frame requires larger room to track effectively to next frame. You can view ahead and see what you need to do.
You can track all together, there's no loss in tracking. You can increase track
effectiveness by using a temporary adustment layer-> sharpen and contrast more.
For rotation tracking, you need more than one track, one middle, one to the side.
If possible, both feature regions should be on the same object, or at least they should both be on objects that are the same distance from the camera. The first feature region (on the left by default) represents the base of the tracking. The farther apart the regions, the more accurate the calculations and the better the result.
You can't track things that go offscreen. If this sounds like a lot of work, you can use another program that is free and less hassle. It's as good as monet for stabilizing footage. Did I mention its free?
Re: Stabilizing Footage by Chris Wright on Sep 15, 2008 at 8:37:21 pm
anything is deshakable if you increase the tolerances enough. They are those numbers that analyze the motion vectors. Defaults settings for you may not be strong enough.
