Stabilizing gimbal walking shots?

Is it possible in Fusion 9 to reduce the up/down bobbing of poorly executed steadicam/gimbal footage?

The Resolve 14 beta stabilizer is of no apparent use here.

I did look, but the only somewhat relevant youtube Fusion tutorial found is in an Indian language and it's tracking a fixed object in a moving shot, which wouldn't work here, since everything's moving.

Be warned, you're talking to a Fusion next to know-nothing. Miracles, anyone?

It depends. If you can do a 3D track of the scene you can use that to stabilize the result.
If there's a feature that you can planar track you can use that to do the same.
Otherwise it's a matter of tracking and stabilizing features and then reintroducing the original smooth motion. There is a script floating around the internet somewhere to assist in this. It smooths out tracks.
But don't expect miracles. If you do the stabilizing too well, the motion blur of the original shot will give away what you did.

What, exactly, was the problem when you tried Resolve?

Resolve can't correct this kind of movement, at all. I also tried Mercalli. Both were useless, adding artifacts but doing nothing for the underlying condition.

Can you share the footage (in PM if necessary) to see if I can do something to help?

Which kind of artifacts?

Warping, altered motion. Also cropping, which would be acceptable if stabilization of the offending motion was taking place, but it isn't.

I've seen before/after shots done with Warp Stabilizer which might be promising, but impossible to say for sure, based on what was provided.

If the problem is that there is too much parallax change, which remains even if rotational wobble is removed, you have no easy solutions. Warp stabilizing might help, but there will be artifacts because no amount of warping can compensate for movement of fg and bg objects relative to each other when they overlap.

Which kind of camera was that? If it was a consumer camera or photographic camera used for filming, it will probably have a massive amount of rolling shutter (RS). That will ruin any kind of stabilization in software. Stabilization will only show it more, because the motion has covered it visually, just like motion blur will show up from sudden bumps.

Sorry to spoil your expectations, but the only perfect way is better shooting practices.

Only chance is first applying a rolling shutter fix, like the one in After Effects, but it only works if the main source of motion is the camera itself and not moving objects/actors in the frame. Next apply stabilization and finally a motion blur fix (all available in AE 2017, get a test installation).

It will be tedious but may save a very important shot.

If the shot is really important and can't be reshot, there is the possibility to dig down into vfx rabbit hole. Logic is to do full scene reconstruction by using camera projections and lots of paint fixes and run a virtual camera through it. Can work wonders, but amount of work is highly dependent on scene content and layout.

As stated in the first post, it's poor Steadicam technique, up/down movement and swaying.

I already know that better technique is the answer, and that the usual stabilization tools don't work. The question was whether *anything* can be done to improve the footage, with specialized tools in Fusion.

You didn't answer which kind of artifacts you are seeing, but did you try the stabilizer in Resolve 14 or the one in After Effects?

As Hendrik pointed out, if your camera is travelling up and down, as opposed to tilting up and down, then there will be parallax change. That is, objects that are closer to the camera appear to move more than objects far away from the camera. You mentioned in your original post that you thought this was the case and I suspect you are correct since the shot is from a steadicam.

Parallax change causes problems for any stabilisation process (not just Fusion) because we are dealing with a 2D image where all the objects in the frame, no matter how far away they were from the camera, all get moved equally by a stabiliser. This means that stabilising a close object adds wobble to distant objects and stabilising distant objects hardly affects close objects.

Warp stabilisers try to get around this by moving the objects differently respecting their individual motions. But this means that a warp stabiliser has to invent pixels to fill in where a stabilised closer object now reveals some of the background that was previously obscured. Or it has to stretch parts of the frame. Unless the motion in the shot is quite minor, it is likely that this process will cause artefacts as the guessed pixels are unlikely to be correct.

So that's a long way of saying that, other than the rabbit hole Hendrik mentioned which involves re-creating the scene in 3D and digitally re-shooting, there is unlikely to be a magic bullet in any software than can deal with extreme cases.

DC

Plus, up-down movements will squeeze and stretch the image if the camera has considerable RS, which confuses warp stabilizers.