I purchased all three of Dynapel's software programs and they all
work great.

James J. Kizak

I've been looking for someone who uses steadyhand.

Please, can you tell me if you've had good results with "steadyhand" ?
Are the results as dramatic as their website demos would have you believe ?
At what stage have you found it best to run footage through the program ? (before starting in Vegas ?)

Thanks

VH

Yes .. the results are good.

I typically use SH before I edit in VV3. Check a previous thread for some suggestions (either here or in the "creative cow" VV forum) on SH settings, especially "Video edge treatment". Set "No edge treatment" and then use VV's Pan/Crop tool to resize the image slightly after SH correction.

Download the demo a try it - you'll be impressed.
Tom

I've used SteadyHand a couple times and been happy with the results. It saved me in a wedding where I was filming without a tripod (usually I'm pretty good coupled with camera stabilization), but during the ceremony I kept having to twist and sway because of a bad back. The tradeoff makes it about even. You get rock-solid stabilization (if there's much movement from the center of the picture it adjusts slowly to the movement) -- however, you definitely lose some resolution. At first this bothered me, but the wedding party never noticed. It almost looked like I was filming from a tripod. In another video taken in 1984 at VHS quality I stabilized a walking scene. Because there was so much swaying and no image stabilization occasionally the faces would blur but still it was so much more comfortable to watch then the original.

[Take a look at the program ICARUS at http://aig.cs.man.ac.uk/icarus
Not only can it stabilize a video clip, it can also correct various lens distortions and best of all, it's free! (non-commercial use). You will need a vfw codec to export video clips. I tried the matrox codec at www.rt2500.tv/download/goodies.html#vfwcodecs and it works fine. Spied this in issue 30 of 3D World magazine.]

Thanks for the link Boomanbb! downloading right now.

It's free for non-commercial use alright but 1000$ for commercial use...damn! I feel sorry for the chaps who sells their vids. :)

Thanks for all the advice everyone !

I have used steadhand (PAL), I have never been happy with the results.
All my work goes to tape and the original camera shake is better than the jittery image from Streadhand. I spoke to Dynapel about it and they have had a number of reports (PAL) that this has been occuring.

I will be trying out this new package for sure!

This is no longer avaliable for downloading and I really need a free software like this.. can anyone of you who downloaded it please email me and maybe share the application with me?

midihead@mail.nu

If you use AE or Premiere (God forbid) , then wait for Steadymove Pro from www.2d3.com .....it is out any day now for only $99 and seems very impressive . Checkout the demo clip of the footage taken out of a car...it looks like it is on tracks after stabilisation!

You can also try VirtualDub/VirtualDubMod with the deshaker plugin, the results are very good.

Boris RED has a motion stabiliser as well and I belive this will be updated in RED 3 which will be available in a few days.

RED also supports AE plugins so SteadyMove pro may work with RED 3 from the Vegas timeline (awesome).

PAW

Ditto--the software is down. If anyone has it downloaded already, please e-mail a copy to tedfinch@austin.rr.com.

Thanks.

SteadyHand is definitely an interesting product. It has great capabilities IN THE RIGHT SITUATION, and Great LIABILITIES, in others. There are quite a few mentions on this forum, if you just use SEARCH, on how to use it correctly. When used in the right situation and used correctly, is it wonderful.

For instance, a place where you do NOT want o use it, is filming a head on shot of a mother and child rocking in a rocking chair with background showing. It is very likely to make the mother and child rock steady and have the background swooping in and out. Well, you did want the mother and child steady, Right? NOPE. Bad choice. Interesting, though.

See the Search, above, on SteadyHand and DynaPel

Really, guys, you need to get aquainted with Google. I typed in "steadyhand download" (without the quotes) and the very first link worked.

http://www.webattack.com/get/steadyhand.shtml

Unless I misunderstand (an all-too often occurence), they were looking for a place to get Icarus, not SteadyHand.

This is kind of fun, and used Icarus for some of the shots.

Been using another part of Icarus for a while to "remove" things, people, from scenes completely. Very interesting application.

mcqeedo:
No, you didn't misunderstand, I did. Funny thing is that Steadyhand is gone, too. That's the reason I did a Google search.

I checked www.dynapel.com twice today, got it both times.

Does steady hand cause any kind of distortions. I checked the video clips they have and the one of them walking down the snow path the asphault looks a little distorted. I was curious to see if any one using it noticed any new artifacts or blurring of video?

Okay, I've dug a deep enough hole already. I see now how to get it from the Dynapel site. Sorry. I need to go outside and get away from editing for a while...

Shogo:
I haven't seen any "distortions" per se, but SteadyHand can't do anything about the blurring that occurs in a frame when the camera moves. Even though the program can steady the video, the image gets a bit blurry at those times the camera was moving the most.

The only other issue is that the usual procedure is to enlarge the frame slightly in order to hide the black borders caused by the steadying process, and enlarging the frame reduces the overall sharpness slightly. When I first began using the program I let SteadyHand do the enlarging; now I leave it at original resolution and do whatever enlarging is necessary inside Vegas, since this method gives me much more precision.

Icarus, as a product, is gone. It is no longer downloadable as of 11 March 2003. It has been farmed out for commercial sale to a new affiliate company called PixelFarm. The product is Tracker. PFTracker, to be precise. It now costs 50 pounds sterling for academic license, or, I believe $1000 pounds commercial. I think I'll run right out and get my copy.

http://www.thepixelfarm.co.uk/

I have icarus-2.07-lite.exe which I believe was one of the last free versions of Icarus. It is 17meg and I have no idea how to email it to anyone. If you are interested let me know.