How to use post-processing to stabilize video captured from a helicopter?

by philg

Folks:

We have a lot of aerial photographers who charter our helicopters and lately they’ve been capturing video as well. We’ve had limited success in the past with using a Kenyon gyro to stabilize the video. Now I’m wondering if digital magic post-processing has progressed to the point that we could improve the video quality on a desktop computer. I found one command within Adobe After Effects called “Animate->Stabilize Motion” and it does not seem useful. You have to pick a point in the scene that you want to remain fixed. I don’t see how this could work with video that is taken from a moving helicopter since the scene is constantly changing.

Does anyone know of a tool that you simply feed a video and walk away while it crunches?

Thanks,

Philip

6 thoughts on “How to use post-processing to stabilize video captured from a helicopter?”

  1. On the Mac, iMovie (which comes free with OS X) has a very nice autostabilization routine. It’s very slow, but very effective. The only downside I can see, and this may not be a problem with very high end video cameras, is that when the shake is taken out, you can see artifacts of the fact that the CCD is read out line-by-line, and things that were once moving now are stationary but will look “dynamically sheared” a bit as the software operates on a frame basis but camera shake actually causes distortion due to the sequential line reads.

    If this is available nearly for free with iMovie, then I imagine its older brother, Final Cut, might do it as well in a more professional setting.

  2. You might try DeShaker, which is a VideoDub plugin. See:
    http://www.guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm
    This claims to work auto-magically.

    Commercially, there are programs that specialized more in tracking stablization than what is built into AfterEffects (or Premiere). Some examples are: Syntheyes (very affordable), Boujou (very un-affordable), Mocha, and maybe PFHoe. A bunch of those programs have trial versions to take a test drive with. Some of them will just end up exporting data for AfterEffects.

    One alternative is to use a point tracker in After Effects (or other similar program) combined with expressions to smooth the tracked point and to transition from one point to the next. This is what I’ve done, but if I had to do this frequently I would definitely invest in a better program.

  3. I’ve never seen footage from an aircraft that stabilized well in post – unless it was already relatively stable and just needed a little extra smoothing.

    I’ve heard really good things about the new Tyler Mini Gyro (tylerminigyro.com) – nice and lightweight, but powerful enough to do the job. It holds several Kenyon gyros inside a case and has a support that rests on the floor (no FAA approval needed).

    As far as software goes, most of the higher end editing programs have stabilization built in or available as a plugin. I don’t know of any high end standalone stabilization software out there – DynaPel for PC or iStabilize for Mac are available on the low end.

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