Removing Shake from Go pro footage

Hello:

Does anyone know of a program that removes camera shake from go pro footage? The cameras were rigged on line above the water and have quite a bit of shake. Is there another program other than virtual dub that people have had success with?

This is for a friend who needs to remove shake in order to run the footage through a tracking program.

Best Fishes!

Unfortunately, there is no good way to remove camera shake--to put it bluntly, the best way to get rid of it is to shoot in a manner that eliminates it in the first place. No judgement, though, I've been in your position before.

You can sometimes get decent results by applying (in the graphics/editing package of your choice; I use Adobe After Effects) a motion tracker to a steady point in the footage, and then applying the output of that motion tracker to the position of the video. This will somewhat stabilize the footage; however, you'll have to crop the footage to the extent that the tracker moves it. So if the footage bounces up by 20 pixels, the tracker will adjust it down by 20 so that the steady point remains in the same place; you'll then have to crop the overall canvas by 20 pixels so that the edge of the video doesn't become visible.

A more comprehensive tutorial on this technique in After Effects

iMovie has stabilisation that works OK for small movement. Too much movement and it doesn't work of course.

You can use Deshaker for VirtualDub.

And, for an off-the-wall suggestion, if you don't mind losing some quality, upload it to YouTube and try their deshaking function, and download the file again with something like this.

You can try ProDAD Mercalli or Warp Stabilizer in After Effects CS5.5.

Forget trying to fix up wobbly GoPro footage, it uses a CMOS chip so has really bad shutter skew with camera shake.

I tried with footage from 4 of them on a shoot and ended up using none of the footage :-)

I agree with Wagsy - the jelly effect from GoPro sensors makes most stabilisation software throw out garbage, but I've never tried footage from the GoPro2 so they could have improved things on those.

GoPro's new housing is supposed to be delivered today, hopefully there will be a focus improvement. All are correct Jillian, the great amount of shake your footage has from being so small as to be almost unavoidable would not really benefit from a stabilization app tho there are many. Core Melt's Lock and Load is one of the best stabilizers I have ever used and Red Giant's Magic Bullet Steady is just about as good. However, these plug ins are for the correction of minor shake and all stabilization plug ins, though they may work with different algorithms, work by scaling up. The thing is that anything scaled by more than 103% is going to reduce resolution and contrast. With a Go Pro, it wouldn't surprise me to learn that it had to be scaled up to 150% or more. However, if your GO PRO were on a tripod and the footage was fairly stable to begin with, these suggested plug ins and apps might do the job for you. Most of them will have free downloadable demos good for a few weeks, so give them a try and let us know how it turned out and the ones you used.

Steve

Thanks guys! I think we have solved it as best as possible with After Effects. It is not my footage, from a student doing his Phd and he cannot re do the shoot. Trying to make the best of what he has! The stability of the camera on the initial trials is definitely the issue.

Cheers,

Got the new GoPRO 2 and the new square port housing in the water last week. The ocean was flat and calm but unfortunately there must have been an algae bloom as the water was dark and green with particulate everywhere. Diving the Yukon at 105', the test footage came out extremely grainy and unusable. We skipped the 2nd dive completely. I had not brought a light for this test as I should have and so I deemed the test unfair. Will get back in with it as soon as possible and conduct a proper test, hopefully, in better dive conditions. I will say this, navigating the Hero2's menu is considerably easier.

A British company, Crumple Pop, also makes a fish eye adjuster plug in for the Go Pros or any other fisheye lens. I works very nicely. Here is the url to my review.

http://www.kenstone.net/fcp_homepage/crumplepop_fisheye_gopro_douglas.html

Steve