Weaker Settings for Stabilizer

[Corpsecreate]

Hi,

I am trying to stabilize my 480p Dragon Ball Z episodes using Stab.avsi:

##############################################################################
#Original script by g-force converted into a stand alone script by McCauley #
#latest version from December 10, 2008 #
##############################################################################

function Stab (clip clp, int "range", int "dxmax", int "dymax", int "mirror") {

range = default(range, 1)
dxmax = default(dxmax, 4)
dymax = default(dymax, 4)
mirror = default(mirror, 0)

temp = clp.TemporalSoften(7,255,255,25,2)
inter = Interleave(temp.Repair(clp.TemporalSoften(1,255,255,25,2)),clp)
mdata = DePanEstimate(inter,range=range,trust=0,dxmax=dxmax,dymax=dymax)

DePan(inter,data=mdata,offset=-1, mirror=mirror )
SelectEvery(2,0) }

I call it using Stab(dxmax=1, dymax=1, range=1, mirror=15). The problem is that these settings (which I presume would be the weakest settings) are removing too much jitter. By too much I mean that scenes that are supposed to shake (like an earthquake) get severely reduced and in some cases become completely still!

I found a fix to this problem by first upscaling the image before calling Stab(). This gave me the desired effect at the cost of severely increasing encode time. Is there some other alternative method that I could use to make the stabilizer weaker at the native 640 x 480 resolution? Perhaps calling Depan myself with a certain set of parameters?

This would literally save me 100's of hours of encode time.

[creaothceann]

Don't use Stab (or any other stabilizer) for earthquake scenes?

[paradoxical]

Don't use Stab (or any other stabilizer) for earthquake scenes?

True, but then that defeats the point of using an automated stabilization script, no? That much manual tweaking would require enormous effort when processing the 150+ episodes of the TV series he is working on. That's not really a helpful answer.

[johnmeyer]

You might want to consider using Deshaker (as a plugin to VirtualDub) instead of Depan. I too have used Depan for stabilization, and it can work quite well, but I'm not as familiar with all of its settings. By contrast, I've written a guide to Deshaker, and also written several scripts to automate its use within Sony Vegas. One of the settings in Deshaker is "Max correction limits." I think this does exactly what you are asking for: it limits the amount of correction (if you want) to just really small movements. You can also play around with the "motion smoothness" settings. This provides averaging across frames.

My guide to Deshaker (which is now pretty old, but reasonably valid) is here:

A Guide To Using Deshaker (http://www.sundancemediagroup.com/articles/deshaker_guide.htm)