Source.

Having played around with Jon and Derrick's GoPros this past month, I wanted to throw together a short video of the skiing, volleyball, and motorbiking. There were a few issues though.

For whatever reason, Rob kept rotating the camera pole, leaving most of his volleball footage shaky about the x-axis. At Northstar we had essentially the same problem, except the camera was pointed axially with the pole, resulting in roll. And at Snow Summit the camera was an afterthought so everything was handheld.

Software solves everything, of course, so I looked into postprocessing solutions.

VirtualDub/Deshaker

Some forums recommended a freeware application and separate plugin. As best I can tell, this tool rotates and pans each frame to generate a steady video. The software can zoom to the new frame boundaries and/or fill them with interpolated pixels. A given frame may look wonky, but it's fairly seamless at speed. Pretty neat.


The output is excellent, but there are a few drawbacks:

• The interface is clunky. Values aren't saved, lots of clicking involved.
• Batching/scripting was confusing, I didn't put much time into it as I was worried it wouldn't support the multiple passes required by the plugin.
• You need your rolling shutter value. Since there was none listed for Jon's 4/Black, I couldn't process any videos from that camera. Derrick's 3/Silver didn't have any values listed either, however the default setting worked for some reason.

Hyperlapse

A Microsoft product, free to try (with watermark), $50 to buy. It seems to do much of the same stuff that VirtualDub does, but apparently also applies some computer vision techniques.


I did notice a reduction in sharpness at times, I expect from some interpolation with zoom or between frames. There isn't much documentation on the tool and even fewer settings. I guess a workaround would be to shoot 4k and screen 1080.

It'd probably be best to get my hands on a copy of Premiere. Windows Movie Maker works okay for basic stuff but for anything where you want to sync the music and footage it is unusable. WMM inseparably links the audio track and video, so if you cut and rearrange the video, the audio goes too.


The GoPro software is pretty powerful and intuitive. I just wish it didn't crash so frequently.



My first attempt, I didn't buy Hyperlapse so it's watermarked.

Related / internal

Related / external