How to minimize motion blur on deshaked footage?

[awolfoutwest69]

I'm working with hand-held footage, captured to HuffYUV AVI using VirtualDub. I've had a good amount of success with Gunnar Thalin's Deshaker filter to stabilize the video.

One aspect of the deshake that I'm trying to address is the motion blur that remains even after stabilization. Is there a filter or technique to reduce the motion blur that now appears to emanate like an aura from the stabilized subject of the video? Would temporal smoothing be an effective approach, or is there a better way? In this case, would it be more effective to apply smoothing to the stabilized image, or smooth before deshaking?

Thanks for any insights/ideas.

[mg262]

I can't think of a really good way to do this... but smoothing before stabilisation would only make things worse, I think (think motion blur).

[guth]

The only way to get rid of the motion blur is to not record it in the first place. And that's easy to avoid by using faster shutter speeds, I'd recommend around 1/500 or so. This is pretty important in order to get good looking, stable video.

[Fizick]

And use real tripod instead :)

[awolfoutwest69]

Well, yes, those would be good techniques to avoid motion blur, but I should have stated that the footage was shot in 1979. Until I can get the bugs out of my flux capacitor, I'm stuck with the video as is... ;)

For the archives...I found one product, ReelSmart MotionBlur, which is designed to add motion blur to CGI and other footage. This filter allows input of a negative value for blur, which does actually reduce motion blur. For my project, camera motion was too violent to effectively reduce blur with this product. It had a limited effect, but not enough to justify the significant processing time required. For relatively steady handheld footage, it would be worth a try, I think.

Thanks for the replies!