Image stabiliser just released

It's recommended for use in Edius.

I am impressed, will we be seeing lots of second hand tripods in the classified forum? ;)

BobA

Interesting. I will try this out tomorrow on the ultimate test for an image stabiliser - A cormorant with wings out to dry (flexing slowly), perched on a reef (static, obviously), with the upper two thirds of the image a nice Atlantic swell.

I shall be not so much surprised as astonished if it delivers anything other than a frenetic cormorant perched on an undulating reef, as the stabiliser tries hard to produce a static sea!

The only stabiliser that I have seen that came anywhere near coping with this scenario was the one Pinnacle provided with ProOne. That gave promising results in preview, but always came to grief when faced with the solid number crunching required for the real thing.

I notice that the samples offered on the site have poor resolution with the originals, and very poor resolution with the stabilised samples - a consequence of sampling in blocks of pixels - maybe 4x4, or even worse - rather than sampling individual pixels. There is also the problem of rapid motion over a series of frames resulting in a blurred image of the moving object in an individual frame, and there is nothing any stabiliser can do about that.

The only real answer is the massive tripods, and unbelievably expensive heads that pros like Gordon Buchanan use

Well, I am surprised! It gives the best results with the rocky cormorant that I have achieved - at least in terms of stabilisation. The let down is the resolution, here it is markedly inferior to my current stabiliser of choice, Steadymove Pro. Use of the sharpen filter on the stabilised clip is also not as effective as with Steadymove.

A major factor for those contemplating purchase is that Mercalli Expert costs around £75, but SteadyMove Pro is currently around £200. When I bought SteadyMove it was £80.

A light version of SteadyMove comes free with Premiere Pro. This uses the same engine as the Pro version, but lacks some of the user defined controls.

To buy, or not to buy; that is the question.

In the last of the first batch of examples "miked scenes"? there is an example of filming from a boat passing what looks like an island. I found it a little strange. Is it because it is natural to have an up and down movement on a boat?

BobA

Bob,

I think that you are being a wee bit harsh re the view of the island; it is the island that the viewer is interested in rather than the inability of the camerman to keep the camera steady.

I have bought the 'light' version for £45 having tried the demo program on 17 year old footage and found that it was brilliant. The software package is now being widely-punted by Liquid users and the small (?) software comapny are very responsive to what have been teething problems, with new betas produced to remove problems.

A major selling point in any new promotion is 'taking a test drive' - the prospective buyer can do this by downloading the software, using and testing, before deciding to buy - or not.

Try-before-you-buy here

http://esd.element5.com/demoreg.html?productid=300175822

Alan Wells

I am not critisizing, as I have said I am very impressed.

The particular clip I meant was taken from a boat and I would expect to see a certain up and down movement from the waves. It felt wrong to me and I would have left the natural movements of the sea in, but as an example of the programs ability to take out unwanted movement it was fine.

BobA

Thee is a facility for varying the degree of smoothing, and this has probably been set too high. There is going to be a problem with any stabiliser when there is a mixture of desired and unintended camera motion. What is needed in a case like this is a smoothing of any jerky motion to leave the rhythmic roll of the boat - always assuming the sea is relatively calm. My last trip of this kind the sea was so rough that footage alternates violently between sea and sky, and the pelagic birds I was aiming at appear only in fleeting glimpses! This again is beyong the realms of any stabiliser.

Many. many years a go when I was a studio cameraman at BBC's White City studios I worked on The Onedin Line. The on board scenes were shot in studio sets and all the cameramen had to gently tilt their cameras up and down to try and simulate the rolling sea!

Derek

This is very clever:

http://www.prodad.de/anim/mercalli/mercalli-paris-dakar.wmv

Just how did Mercalli create the rear of the 4X4 at the point where it apparently is almost lost from the right hand side of the screen in the untreated clip?

Presumably some judicious cropping has gone on. I just hope the samples are genuine as I have just bought the expert version - incidentally the price quoted does not include VAT, so the UK price is around £90.

Never mind the rear of the 4x4. two seconds into the clip there is just about a foot of the roof showing. Is it genuine, and if so how on earth do they do it?

BobA

I don't think that the stabilised clip can be genuine - how can you stabilise the image of a car if it has completely disappeared from the original clip yet show it in the middle of the stabilised version. The software may still be excellent and I hope some of the buyers will please share their true experiences with us.

The explanation is probably that the clip for the original is displayed cropped.

I have been using stabilisers for nearly five years now, and have tried every one that I could find. Until I saw this one, I had established to my own satisfaction that 2d3 SteadyMove Pro gave the best results for my wildlife material.

I tested the trial version of Mercalli yesterday, and it was immediately clear that this gave superior results. It allows the user far more control over the processing, the downside of which is that I will have to learn to use it in order to get the best results.

As I mentioned in a previous post the stabiliser clip from hell is a Cormorant perched on a reef which occupies the bottom third of the screen only. The upper two thirds is occupied by rough sea, with the Cormorant silhouetted against it. All other stabilisers I have tried, except for the short lived one which Pinnacle supplied with the ProOne card (and this only worked for preview, the finished file was poor), try to stabilise the sea, and produce an undulating reef and a cormorant with DT.

A couple of dummy runs only were required with Mercalli to get an acceptable result.

You have to bear in mind with this sort of software is that there are inevitable trade-offs. There is inevitable motion blur with fast moving objects - when moving the brain interprets the image as a moving object and we do not see the blur, when the object has been stabilised the brain fails to process the blur, which we then see. Secondly unless the image is zoomed, you have variable borders around the stabilised image in the centre of the frame. Zooming inevitably reduces resolution. Thirdly all of these software packages process pixels in blocks rather than individually, simply to cut down on number crunching, and again this leads to a loss of resolution.

Having said all this, a couple of days experiment with Mercalli has convinced me that this is as good as it gets, even at £91 for the expert version.

As I mentioned when I started this thread; "The examples on their web-site seem too good to be true". Your scepticism is understandable but rather than just cry foul why don't you you download the software for yourself (its free to try) and test it out with some of your own footage.

Thats what I did and found it, as Alan did, one of the best available. I think it will be one of the best investments ive made in plug-ins to 'get-me-out-of-a-hole'.

Interestingly, as the day has gone on, I have found that for some clips, SteadyMove Pro gives better results. It may simply be that I have not yet tried the optimum settings for Mercalli.

Just a little update

ProDad have today posted a service pack for Mercelli (V1.0.9). From the history on their site:-

06-Oct-2007 1.0.9
Border blurring improved
Stabilization quality improved with zoomed results
Avid Liquid 7.x: Shut Down issue sloved

Oh, what wonderful timing! I have just got through their unbelievable registration and activation mill, and now I have a patch to install.

It is ironic that they have this complex system to prevent piracy, and when I put Mercalli into Google the first few hits were all warez and cracker sites for the software.

one word AWFUL, for me its crap
supposed to be expert mode in demo but its not.
flickers, blurs no matter what settings u use, no use whatsoever.

Using Premiere you would need to have the 1.08 service pack installed - this is mentioned on the site. As of yesterday this has been superseded by the 1.09 pack, I assume they are differential rather than incremental.

Also with Premiere you MUST de-interlace your clip before applying a stabiliser. I notice that you use Matrox RTX on one system. Due to the use of UFF by Matrox there is a further cause of trouble if you do not de-interlace.

I noticed that even though the trial download was identical in size to the Expert version, the extended feature set was inoperative. Be assured that it works, and works well, in the full version.

This is not like other stabilisers which are much more automated, you have to learn the settings to use with each type of motion and content.

At the moment there are a couple of clips that I cannot fathom with this, but for others it is in a different league to anything else that I have tried. Smoothing of pans is the best example.

Thanks for this. Just what I need for aeroplanes where I think this will come into its' own!

Prodad were the Adorage s/w people of years ago on the Amiga I believe.

I hope it is better for aircraft than for Kites (avian) - this is one of the areas for which I cannot get good results. I suspect you will be OK, as the aircraft movement is more predictable and consistent, my Welsh Kites jink about all over the sky.

On current showing, I shall continue to use SteadyMove for some types of clip, but I am cetainly grateful that Matthew brought Mercalli to my attention.

Cheers for the answer
I have not purchased it, i've only got the demo so i can't mess around with settings. There is no way i would purchase without testing the expert settings which i obviously can't.

Its annoying because the demo states it is the expert version but it obviously isn't. I might email them.

as for the interlacing how does that work? will it re interlace the footage for me or am i left with de interlaced footage? as if its the latter for me that unacceptable.

I assume this prodad stuff is better than AE's motion stabilizing?

The File Info shows as UFF in a Matrox project - but I always stabilise clips on a separate timeline, and then export the stabilised clip as a Matrox avi.

I have just tried a short clip of a flying crow without de-interlacing, using the latest version of Mercalli, and there is no problem. I selected Premiere Pro 2 in the video format section. Obviously whatever they changed in the the 1.08, or 1.09 patch has solved the Adobe problem. I am very surprised at this, as being Matrox the clip is UFF, rather than the usual LFF. You do have a choice in the format box of PPro, UFF, LFF or progressive together with a set of HD formats.

With SteadyMove Pro the wings would gave been all over the place if I did no de-interlace.

A good sign with Mercalli is that they do seem to be developing it. The other four stabilisers that I have tried have not been developed since Premiere 6 days, apart from a token gesture towards PPro from SteadyMove.

I've been using Mercalli in preference to AE, much faster and it seems, better results, but you do have to fiddle to get it right. The upside is that renders are pretty quick, there's loads of easy to test presets, the software is cheap and it works very nicely with HD.

Paul

The aircraft are , as you say stable, the camera is generally at a level of magnification that means smooth panning can be difficult. Often it is not possible to use a tripod as the speed of the subject is high and direction changeable.

May make time to experiment tomorrow and report back.

The trouble is i don't want to purchase this if i can't test the expert settings.
No reply yet from the company

I'm surprised at the differences of opinion here.

On one side we've got Matthew Brockman, Bob Aldis, Alan Craven, Alan Wells, ChrisG, paultv, all of whom like it, and on the other side "Mad Mardy" who thinks it's crap. Both camps can't be right.

With the votes split 6:1 so far, I'd hesitate to call it "crap" unless there's some specific footage that it signally fails with. Is this what we're led to believe? If so, can we have some explanations please?

To be fair Alan I have downloaded but not tested. I have a real use for such a programme. Prodad do have a history of lateral thinking in solutions so I will be disappointed if it doesn't do what it says on the the box.

FWIW I would expect good results from the basic default settings because that is wher e most punters will get their first reaction.

Will try and give some objective feed back tomorrow.

Rendering times in LE 7.2 anyone?

Well even with the patch it still flickers, blurs in and out of focus and looses a lot of resoloution so at least for me i stand by what i say. Maybe its just my footage, i'm just using the demo (non expert) or perhaps to you this is acceptable.
What i would be interested in is seeing some of the stuff you have corrected, by you i mean anyone who's having success with it.
I mean, perhaps i'm expecting too much. but to ME it looks better un corrected.
To be honest i'm quitting this discussion now. You love it thats great, i don't, its my choice,
i'm not going to worry about it i've never needed to use image stabalisers before so not using one now isn't going to make any difference

I think the two views may well be consistent - we are looking for, and expecting different things from the software. My video is simply an expensive hobby; what I produce is seen only by myself, my wife and a few close friends. Perhaps Mardy is looking for a professional standard solution? Well they do exist, but they are very expensive pieces of hardware, but even they cannot overcome the motion blur entirely. Personally I think Mardy's "c**p" is an over-statement, but then maybe I am old-fashioned(maybe? More like certainly!).

This is an example of the kind of hardware solution:

http://www.ovation.co.uk/Video-Stabilization.html

Almost all of my video is of wildlife, taken with very long focal length lenses (up to 1600 mm in 35 mm terms). I use a tripod whenever possible, but at these focal lengths in the great outdoors, my tripod does not always eliminate camera movement. I know I should use a heavier model, but I am no longer young and do not wish to carry the load. I always carry a small Canon camera when I am out walking and use this for grab shots, usually without a tripod. It is for this footage that I find the stabiliser useful. Some footage can be improved dramatically, but in other cases the increased image stability is not worthwhile due to the reduced resolution and visible motion blur. Sometimes a compromise can be struck by using a lower level of stabilisation; on other occasions I leave the footage as it is - sometimes it is simply not usable. One solution to the loss of resolution is to opt for fixed borders rather than expanding to fill the screen. The crude frame that results can be improved in Premiere.

An example of this came last month in Wales when I came face to face with a Red Backed Shrike - a breeding bird we have recently lost from this country. The few we see are usually on the East coast. I had no time to use a tripod or bean-bag; there was no convenient post, so hand-held it was, with 900 mm focal length. The footage is inevitably shaky, but I have achieved a dramatic improvement by using a stabiliser - in this case SteadyMove has given better results than Mercalli, but I suspect that this is because I have not yet worked out the settings for Mercalli.

The only ideal solution for my kind of video is far heavier, and far more expensive equipment, and for me this is not a possible solution, so I shall continue to use, and try to be content with, what is available as a compromise.

Alan, I'm with you on all of that. Although I do professional consultancy work for high-end shoots, I only ever do the consumer stuff for myself, so I can see both ends of the arguments. That's why I didn't want to jump on anybody. It was just that the views seemed so polarised that I wanted a little clarification.

Incidentally, even with a huge heavy tripod, you'll get image movement with a long lens simply because of air-disturbance in the light path. Image stabilisation has almost no chance of correcting that because the motion isn't uniform over the image. You just have to live with that.

Several years ago, I stabilised a short shot by hand in Cinestream, moving each frame by inspection. The result looked very odd. The basic motion had gone away and the important parts of the image were indeed stable, but the camera integration from the original shaky shot was still there, so I had a stable shot that went soft all on its own, erratically. I junked the half day it took me to do it and left it shaky, it looked better. The problem is always that of trying too hard, a stbiliser that easzes off the worst shakes would probably have done a much better job than my arduous pinning of the motion.

ChrisG - The rendering times in AL7.2 are very fast, at least on my machine, specs below. You have to turn off Background rendering (yellow bars) because of the way Mercelli analyses and then renders (I assume). Thats no hardship for me, I almost always edit with b/g rendering off.

I think its quite amazing that people seem prepared to damn or praise this little application simply on the strengths of the comments on this thread. Its free to try, download it and give it a go, decide for yourself and post your findings here

Mad Mardy has done that and found that it doesnt work for him - fair play. Others, myself included, have found the opposite. Its causing a bit of a storm over on the Avid Liquid forums amongst professionals and hobbyists alike.

I edit my own stuff as a hobby and own and run a corporate video production company as a profession. Mercelli first came to my notice on the Avid forums after we had a situation at work that needed stabilization. To cut along story short we paid a fortune to take a project into an Avid DS nitris suite to de-shake the footage. The results were good but I have been able to get better subsequently with Mercelli, admittedly with some experimentation, If I'd had that at the time I'd be a bit richer today!

I thought it was I find I should share with the DV doctor community hence this thread. All I can say is dont rely on my reccommendation or the others here - just try it yourself.

Alan R, the air disturbance is not usually a problem for me as the actual ranges are not all that long. The problem is that my subject is very small. My Shrike was about 15m away, but it is a mere 16 cm long and maybe 5 cm wide when perched.

It is certainly a problem for flight shots of raptors, though.

As I said earlier, I am grateful to Matthew for bringing this to my attention. It may well have escaped me otherwise as I have no reason to visit the Avid and Edius forums, where it is being discussed. At least we can try before we buy - the missing features in the demo are the more advanced tweaks. They improve performance with some material, but the presets that you can select work well in most cases.

Matthew, that's really my point, praise and condemnation in the same thread raised my curiosity. That's why I asked for evidence. Interesting that "Mad Mardy" hasn't come back.

Alan, I understand, it;s just that I've been confronted with shots from a Canon 40:1 zoom with the extender in, where the pictures shake around quite a bit just because or air movement.

And, thanks to Matthew for bringing the product to our attention. As ever, it won't be perfect, it won't solve all problems, it's just another tool for use on those shots where it does more good than harm. And that's really the best you can expect from any piece of technology.

I have got hold of Mercalli expert and I'll have it on the demo PC at the IOV show.

David Clarke at DVC is in the process of becoming a reseller so he will probably have it on display too.

I have yet to look at the results of the expert version on a HD screen, but to me this appears to be the best image stabliser I have seen. The Expert version can stablise a hand held pan or tilt!

My limited experience suggests that pan shots are the ones where it delivers the best results.

That's to be expected. The easiest shots to stabilise are those with linear translation, i.e. the entire image just moves in one direction, continuously and smoothly. The problem arise when the motion includes rotation, isn't continuous, or the image has lots of motion within it. Then you need some very hefty motion analysis software. Fortunately, the phase-correlation motion analysis used in MPEG (but developed for the Eureka 1250-line HD project in the 1980s) is pretty good, and is widely used in stuff like this.

Sorry, come back and say what? (not meant in a snotty fashion)
I'd probably agree with Alan Craven that maybe we are looking for different things.
but then again maybe not as what i'm looking at here with mercalli i wouldn't even use in an amateur production, its really, really bad and i'm only trying to correct light handheld wobble.
It just blurs in and out,flickers and pixelates constantly.
The problem for me is that i can't test it how i would like to because i've got the DEMO and its not the expert version that was promised. Using the expert version might be a different kettle of fish.
The reason I used the C word originally was that overall thats how i felt.
I was promised the demo of the expert version (website and email confirmation state this) and i didn't get it, it looked awful and i found it unusable, there were no settings to change (basic mode) and i felt i'd lost most of an evening for nothing.
i don't like companies that seem as if they can't be bothered, if they can't make an effort why should i buy or praise their product.

----------------------------------------------------
Definatley not a member of the Mutual Admiration Society

Took the plunge and purchased the full version. Wanted to stabilise two hand held HDV shots, one slight zoom and one mid range zoom. Found that the profiles were magic and did a very good job indeed. Then tried it on a hand held pan which had a cross chest track at the same time - it smoothed the pan very elegantly indeed. Both shots suffered from a slight softening as they had to be enlarged around 10% I guess but all in all totally acceptable for me.

Dear Mad

You are right - although ProDad indicate that the demo version is the 'expert' one I could not get access to the extended adjustments to see how they worked. It would only operate in basic mode for me too. However it was clear to me that it was an impressive product even at the basic mode.

I have since coughed-up for the expert version and I can tell you that the extra adjustments you get are really just very fine tweaks - if it won't work for you in basic I would doubt that expert would make a difference.

I don't know which software you use to edit with, but I can only conclude that something isn't working correctly between what ever you use and Mercalli. The results you describe are just not consistent with the others in this thread or on the Avid Forums - and I can assure you that my quality standards are as equally high as yours.

If you are concerned to make Mercalli work for you then I would reccomend you follow-it up with them - I am surprised to hear that they have not responded to your emails; again, others report a very responsive and reactive attitude from their support dept - borne out by the fact that they have released at least two patches in response to shortcomings reported by both Avid Liquid and Premier users since its initial launche a few weeks ago.

Ok well i thought i'd have another go.
i reinstalled mercalli + the service pack
and funny i can now get the expert settings but unfortunatly this has made no difference
the result can only be described as embarassing.
I tried basic presets plus basic presets + tweaking.
De interlacing the footage made it worse.

So now i tried it on my other suite which was in use last time
and while there is a marked improvement i still think the result was poor. a definate flickering and throbbing like you can sometimes get with slow mo on all moving shots.
i think one staic shot that was handheld it might be acceptable on.
the resoloution loss didn't seem to be as bad on this one though (although still noticable).

all in all definatly not for me

as for edit program, Premiere Pro 1.5 and 2

I agree about not belonging to mutual admiration societies. What I noticed was polarised views, and asked for clarification. Alan Wells tells me that he's satisfied with the Expert version, and can't understand your problem. I suggest we leave it at that until you've had a chance to try the Expert version. But, as you correctly say, no stabiliser's going to be 100% perfect (read my posting about doing it by hand), you can't get rid of the motion blur resulting from camera integration unless you've got a wildly complex process that deconvolves the frames into a very high frame rate, stabilises that, then convolves back down to the normal frame rate.

That sounds rather convoluted!:D

I have seen suggestions on DVinfo and the Avid Liquid forum that you can get better stabilisation results from an HD source with SD output, whatever the method used. This makes sense, of course. This has resulted in the first glimmer of interest in HD for me.

Pretty obvious really, you get 4 times the source data to play with.

The first glimmer of interest Alan C? I suppose you mean in working with HD rather than watching it, yes?

That would make sense.

I urge anyone using this trial to inspect the results on a full size display. I'm trying it out on HDV only since I no longer edit SD and I can indeed see great promise with this program, it's a breath of fresh air compared to the time spent doing this in After Effects, but the issue for me is all to do with the border options.

Unless you are going from HD to SD and thus have pixels to sacrifice thus losing the visible moving borders issue I just don't see a solution to the border issues ,don't think there ever can be.

It does a great job of holding the scene steady, is amazingly fast to do it's stuff, real time for me but the border dancing in and out of view as it moves the frame around is the killer here.

I'm using Edius 4.5 with a 26" HDTV for a monitor (HD expansion unit) thus seeing the result big and at close quarters and I can't accept the loss of resolution and softness of the image caused by the default mode to hide the moving borders, nor can I accept the alternatives which include filling the border with a de-focused blob of color from elsewhere in the scene, in one clip the top of the vicars head was repeated (blurred) upside down above the original, at the top of the frame.

However what interests me is when I set it to NOT fill in the borders and NOT enlarge it to hide them, then I see very nice results with little or no quality loss, just the scene is now held remarkably central instead of shaking around, so it's working:)

I think I will settle for this smaller but sharper image and just place my own background behind the frame, seems to me the best overall solution?

Or how about 24hrs style pips?

"Putting your money where your mouth is, is the name of the game".

I have sent Alan Roberts an .avi file with the untreated clip side-by-side with the Mercalli filter applied and AR reckons that it was a success - praise indeed from someone who has possibly forgotten more about video than I could ever hope to learn!

The moral of this thread could be a "saw" that I learned from my father many years ago - "if you cannot say something good about something, better to say nothing".

Prodad have produced a product that can be very useful to some - it may not please all, so if you don't like it, say nowt and leave those who like it to continue with their ignorance.

I hope that this will not dissuade others who think that they may have discovered a gem that may be useful to other browsers of these forums, to post away and let each of us judge its usefulness in our own environments.

Thank you and goodnight.

Thanks Claire, a breath of fresh air there :)

You're absolutely right, any image stabilisation is bound to move the edge of the frame into shot as it works. Tricks to cover this up are bound to have serious limits. As I've said many times here, scaling is not a trivial task, most software solutions produce poor results, some produce very poor solutions, but the resampling-without-scaling that you describe should be ok because it's the scaling that causes the problems.

Alan W, to be fair, I did say that I'd have to see it at full size before praising it. But I trust your judgement, if you say you like the result, that's good enough for me, particularly when you read what Claire's just reported.

Even image stabilisation 'up-front' as you film moves the edge of the frame around, and often fitting a wide-converter will show you this. Those with VAP OIS (PD170, VX2100, XM2, XL1s etc) might like to see how their vari-angle prism stabilises the image:

http://www.canon.com/bctv/faq/vari.html

tom.

Where would the world be if we all did that

Where would the world be if we all did that

The French say it better which is possibly your point of view - "Je suis que je suis mais je ne suis pas que je suis"

Good luck to all South of the Border as we approach "le kick off"

Thank you Alan 3, but the events in Paris are of little consequence compared with Leeds 33, St Helens 6. This is the real Armageddon even with four men short!

OK

Shot some ground to air hand held stuff at w/e and ran it into the s/w thru LE 7.2

First render on default. Result quick as Alan said. But a problem with the result. It is possibly to accurate as it shows the wing quiver as the pilot corrects. If you have ever seen close ups in air to air or of same a/c you will have seen this. However it doesn't look good for ground to air shots. I am also not convinced it isn't a result of rendering rather than accurate representation.

Next tried the pre-set for following a moving object in the air - much better results this time, no quiver. But when the wing of the aircraft goes near the edge of the screen the rendering distorts the screen at that point. Need to look at the settings again.

So conclusion of the demo version is this: Cautious thumbs up with provisos for ground to air video work.

My experience has been that you choose to either have a border around the frame or not and Mercalli moves the frame to keep the important picture area central. Then you choose to either keep the black border or have Mercalli fill the border which it appears to do with a blurred "infill" taken from surrounding nearby pixels.

Thus if your "important picture area" (subject) is near the to the edge of the frame it will likely suffer this distortion. I'm guessing this is why you see the wing distorted and I saw a blurred top of the Vicars head re-appear upside down above his original head :D

Here I'm still evaluating Mercalli but already am thinking I might buy it, yes it is not perfect but what else like this is as fast and cheap, as easy to use and effective?

Important points are I think to view the results on lots of different types of clips, and also if possible at full size, the way the end user will see it, ie: warts and all.

Yes, this is pretty much what I thought. I think once you understand the programme and what it is doing you then film or cut accordingly.

As you say for the price it is one to have in the armory. I will be investing.

Chris

Bought this at lunchtime today.....still waiting for unlock .exe

Chased once via email.

Anyone know how long it takes to arrive?

Ich wirklich erwartete nicht die Aktivierung warten zu müssen. Sie erwähnten nie dieses, bevor ich die Sache kaufte. Dieses ist schrecklich und ich bin wirklich unglücklich.

Pardon?

Mine took a couple of days to arrive - there is something to this effect on the web-site.

Just had an e-mail offering 20% discount for on line purchase from the pro-dad site :)

I've now got it installed in Edius. While it's true you can get rubbish results with it if you don't use it sensibly, it makes a splendid job of most problems. It's hugely flexible so the results you get are more to do with getting the settings right than with it's algorithms. It seems to to far better than I'd thought possible at the price.

I have ended up using it set to fixed black borders in most cases. I then can scale as necessary to keep the borders off-screen, using the over-scanning.

Finding the optimum settings for a particular clip can be a great way of spending an afternoon.

Hi. Just been on the site and can't find a reference to the 20% discount. Any chance you could forward the email link (either here or PM me) as we were already seriously considering buying it and the 20% discount would make the deal rock steady (bad pun intended unfortunately!)

Thanks - Karrie

I've just upgraded to Premiere Pro CS3 and have some wobbly holiday shots to process, so I thought I'd try the Mercalli trial after reading this thread.

I was quite impressed at first by the quality of the results, but after playing about with 4 or 5 clips with various settings, trying to render caused the PC to go into apparent hibernation for many minutes, after which further attempts caused what seemed like a permanent stagnation of Premiere and almost strangled every other operation, too. Memory used (according to task manager when it eventually appeared) was 1.7Gb out of 2Gb RAM and low CPU activity.

Has anyone any similar experiences or feedback on their use of Mercalli before I give up and go back to AE's stabiliser and hand adjustment thereafter (much less slick, but at least it doesn't fall over) ?

Thanks.

XP Pro SP2, Core 2 Duo 2.8, 2Gb RAM, NVidia 8800GTX - all drivers and Adobe software up to date.

Works here on 3.2Ghz P4HT, 2GB RAM, XPProSP2, RT.X100 & PP1.5.1

Registration was slow process but once that was sorted I haven't had any snags - it just does what is sez.

ProDad seem OK - We got a swift reply to a question about using it on a laptop with same license.

I tried phoning them at one stage but got a German telephonic "push 1 then hash" quiz......