Stabelizing RED footage shot from a helikopter

Hello Forum
I now try for hours to stabelize RED Dragon 6K footage, shot from a helikopter over a volcano. I use the tracking tool and the recommended Match Move option and must have tryed almost every possibility. But the result is very poor. The picture is still quite unstable. When I use Mercalli with Edius and choose the "glide camera" option", it works fine, but the plugin version does only support 2 K. The standalone version does not support RED Files so Fusion should be the way to go, shouldnt it? The Problem seems to be the moving camera because we are constantly flying slowly over the location. I am shure everybody knows what I mean. Does anyone has a solution?
Thank you very much.
Klaus

Hi Klaus,

Try changing the trackers reference time from start, to start & end

your helicopter should 'glide' now.
You can also modify the track path using Savintzky Golay filter which you can use to smooth the results as well, taking out the high frequency noise.

Let me know if this helped

Rony

with Fusion Studio You have a Dimension - an optical Flow toolset. With generated motion vectors You could use a SmoothCam fuse, Courtesy of Stefan Ihringer, a.k.a. Tilt.

One solution to go for when stabilizing long takes from drones or car-mounted cameras is 3D stabilization.
You need a 3D tracker of course and if you use Syntheyes you could even do the whole thing in that software.

But you can also do the stabilization in Fusion by importing the 3D camera track. The whole process is similar to

I once did: You project from your shaky camera track and re-capture it using a smoothed camera path.

The fuse that Marek has mentioned can be found here. The docs used to be on vfxpedia but there's a video on my blog that explains its usage. It's basically a Mercalli-like proof of concept that I have never tried on forward-moving footage. If it works for your helicopter shot let me know
creating motion vectors in 6K would be a massive task but my Fuse reduces any motion vectors to a really small array (like 4x4) anyways so you could create the vectors using a really small proxy version of your footage and then multiply their values accordingly.

Since vfxpedia is offline, here are's the description of the SmoothCam Fuse:

http://www.steakunderwater.com/wesuckle ... .php?t=219

edit: just realized that the Fuse doesn't work anymore since Fusion 7. Seems like a bug in the LUA bindings for Matrix4 when the object is created using a 16-element table.