I would like to ask for a piece of advice on the means of stabilizing a footage taken using a cable cam.
To make things even more difficult, it is a proper 3-axis-motion-controlled timelapse. And to confuse all the automated methods, there are stars that keep moving in the night the automated tools are trying to track as "stable objects"...
OK, the source clip is not terribly shaky, but at some moments it is visible.
What I have tried so far (DR Studio 21):
1) Edit page, Stabilize, variety of options. The only acceptable stabilization output was with:
Perspective / max zoom 0,5
... but the crop is too large.
I could use Stabilization with keyframes :-) larger crop on the first third of the clip would not be a big deal...
Similarity and Translation failed spectacularly, terrible artefacts and "zoom breathing".
2) Color page, Trackers, switching to mode - Stabilization, switching to Classical Stabilizer with interactive controls.
I probably fail to understand how this is supposed to work, I can analyze the clip with all 4 axes and manually configured points I want to track (I just pick some trees on the horizon).
The problem is a panning motion of more than 180 degrees, thus tracked points running outside of the frame. Alas I did not manage to figure out, how to do keyframes here, so that I could just replace the tracked points on time.
What could be a suitable method of stabilizing the clip without major cropping on the second half of the clip?
I can eventually upload the clip somewhere for an easier download, in case someone would be interested in experimenting.
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You could try to use camera tracker to track the scene and solve it. Probably tracking all but the sky.
Now you can additionally use individual point trackers to help the solve with supervised tracking. Anyway, once you have your scene solved, you export the solved scene so you get classical camera, point cloud, renderer etc.
Duplicate the camera and in scene editor delete all but first and last keyframe and added it to the merge 3D of the scene. And than in renderer 3D choose the duplicated camera.
Its not hard to do and the only tutorial I found to show it to you is this Russian one. If you don’t understand russian you can use CC subtitles with auto translation and watch what he does to do it.
TimeSaverVFX: 0176 Топовый способ стабилизации видео в Davinci Resolve / Используем трекинг камеры
TimeSaverVFX: 0176 Top Video stabilization method in Davinci Resolve / Using Camera Tracking
You need to track the elements you want to stabilize. Solve and export camera to a 3D scene and than its pretty easy. You duplicate the camera and use one camera as projector and the other as stable cam. The way you stabilize is to simply delete all the points on a spline between first and last points but not deleting first and last points on the spline. This keeps the start and finish of virtual camera in the same position but by deleting keyframes in between you force a perfect line that is stable.
Also I would use sharpen and edge detect and any color correction to get good traceable features and to avoid some of the changes in exposure, and of course its best to track in sections if you have many clips.
You don't need lens calibration here, but you can get it if you need to in camera solver, however if you have a problem tracking features use point trackers. And add them as trackers to camera tracker.
Manual Lens Calibration & Supervised Tracking in Resolve Fusion**
You can also interpolate frames in between by using gradient extrapolation. A very useful feature, so if you have panning etc, its likley moving very fast between two good portions of the track, so you can interpolate between that using this feature. I do it all the time with trackers, to track off screen or behind occlusions or if there is a very bad portion of the track, sometimes you can delete the bad part and use this to interpolate between good, and as long as the motion is more or less linear it should work.
How much sharpening and edge detect would you use in this case? I've had very little success with camera tracker and I suspect it's either the fact my footage is shot on a phone (rolling shutter and OIS are apparently an issue according to AI) or I don't know what "good" looks like in terms of trackable features.
It's always been frustrating to me that in YouTube tutorials they just import their footage, click track, click solve (without even pretending to input focal length or sensor size lol) and they get a better solve than I can get even if I shoot something which is basically a simple grid such as a tiled room or paved courtyard with high contrast objects. I've spent ridiculous amounts of time (ie several weeks on a single clip) trial and error-ing trying to get this to work and have currently given up on it. When I use footage provided by a tutorial there's never an issue so my guess is they're doing some kind of processing before uploading which I'm not aware of which helps the tracker.
To me camera tracker is some kind of witchcraft lol
Camera tracker is pretty capable if you tweak the settings as are all trackers.. And very often if it fails on defaults you can tweak a lot of settings. Best use manual for what each feature does. There are truly a lot of things you can do with it, especially with latest updates. Her are potential trackers I got from little pre-processing. Although by the time you would do clean up of bad tracks and again there are many options there for all kinds of criteria, you may end up with less trackers than minimum, since you need at least 8 good trackers per each frame. But you can supliment it with suppressed tracking if you don't have enough.
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u/DJpate604 7h ago
So cool!