I have worked on hours of footage from yesteryear. It was all recorded by my late father, my late mother and myself. All on Super 8 film. Mostly in the 1970’s.
Now, those camera’s had no means to stabilize whatsoever and, hence I used the stabilizing option in Kdenlive.
By far most of this is fantastic! Unfortunately, I occasianally I see a person or object shaking. Especially when the camera “follows” the person or object.
Is there any setting or way to resolve this? I’ve tried a few settings but to no avail.
By the way, I am very pleased with how I was/am able to restore the original colors. And all the other enhancements. Thank you team!
I’ve never had great joy with the clip stabilsation - though that could be a function of any or all of the type of footage I’m processing and my lack of skill or finesse with tweaking its options suitably. It usually ends up being some tradeoff between the original shake, and blur or jitter of things of interest, though it has sometimes worked well.
The Gyroflow option I’m playing with now obviously isn’t an option in this case, but what has worked well for me before with some footage is to use the motion tracker.
If your footage has some object or person which stays relatively central for ‘long enough’ periods, you can use the motion tracker to track it - then copy the keyframes from that into a transform effect (using the option to invert the position coordinates, and a suitable offset if what you tracked isn’t actually in the center of the frame). You’ll then have that object rock solid (for as well as the motion tracker could track it), and you’ll just need to add enough zoom to keep the translated frame filling the screen.
If your footage pans so that nothing stays central enough between cuts, you can cut a temporary copy of the clip and repeat this for some object that stays central in each portion.
This can be quite easy, or quite labour intensive, depending on your raw footage and what in it you are prepared to lose to stabilisation cropping - but you will get no other distortion or jitter in the result.
Fortunately I did have a lot of succes with the stabilizer.
Of course this was also due to the fact that Super 8 is less than 1920 pixels wide when scanned at 1080p.
This allows me to crop the footage on either side just a bit without losing much important stuff.
Your suggestion to use the motion tracker is one that I might try in the future.
Thanks for that!
I think it’s safe to say I only have less than a minute of this artifact on a total of several hours. So, it’s not too bad.
I was merely wondering if my my lack of skills was the cause and/or if there was an easy solution. Apparantly not, so it seems.
Thanks again for your effort to provide me with an anwer and a possible solution.
That’s an interesting point … I’ve mostly only tried using it on 4k clips, and you’ve reminded me that I’ve still got some patches for slomoUI I should send to that project - because it needed parameters much larger than it would let me enter by default to make it work well interpolating ‘4k sized’ objects.
So now you’ve got me wondering if I should spend a bit more time understanding this stabiliser, possibly learning to tweak it harder …
I think the majority of people using Kdenlive are likely working with 1080p video not 4k, unless you happen to be one of the people in the minority that have a high end camera or a high end smart phone with a high end camera, and a High end computer. I don’t even have a 4k monitor on my laptop, nor a GPU (I have Intel video, no one ever supports Intel video, people are always about Nvidia and AMD, never Intel video), nor do I have a 4k camera. The problem is that when you want to buy a laptop the only laptops with Nvidia video are always those ugly gaming laptops that look like they were designed for teenagers and really immature people because of their demonic looking emblems on the lids and keyboards that light up red which makes gaming laptops look like they are from hell. So I settled on a non gaming laptop when I purchased my laptop and non gaming laptops are almost always Intel video not Nvidia. My laptop has Intel(R) UHD Graphics 620 for Video, Intel(R) Core™ i7-8550U CPU @ 1.80GHz, 2001 Mhz, 4 Core(s), 8 Logical Processor(s) for Processor, and 32.0 GB of ram, it is a LENOVO_MT_20KS_BU_Think_FM_ThinkPad E580, System Model 20KS003NUS. And for my camera I have the last model of iPod touch to ever be made, which has 1080p video, iPod Touches have been discontinued. I do not have a smart phone or stand alone camera. And anyway most people in most countries cannot even stream 4k video because of the bandwidth required, it costs more to have a fast enough internet connection that is capable of streaming 4k. If you want to reach a wider audience you should produce your videos in 1080p HD not 4k or at least transcode them down to 1080p HD.
Aha, yes I can fully understand why you’re not having much luck with stabilizing video if they are in 4K format.
It’s probably best to have some room on either side of the video.
That way you don’t need to zoom and such.
Now here is a thought. What if you would recode the 4K footage to, say, 2100 X 3790 or whatever is exactly 16:9. If Kdenlive can’t do this, handbrake will.
Use a 4K profile at 2160 X 3840 in Kdenlive. Now you will have some “wiggleroom” to stabilize. I set the stabilizer to maximum 30 pixels “swing” and that gave me a great result. You may have to experiment.
After stabilizing and cropping you may have to resize to 2160 X 3840 again but that seems like a small task. You may lose a tiny bit of quality but it’s usually way better than a shaky video.
By far most tv’s today are 4K capable so 4K is definitly worth a shot (pun partially intended).