How to stabilize scanned film footage in DaVinci Resolve?

It is about stabilizing the high frequency trembling/jittering of scanned 16mm footage, caused by the mechanical intermitting transport of the film in the camera and in the film scanner.
For the aim to stabilize the film footage the idea is to track a single point in x/y-axis reference to the frame - for example the sprocket hole or the strip/bridge between two images, by purpose being part of the over-scanned image (see image example in below). After tracking it should be possible to stabilize the image.
Assuming that this should be a quite simple task I cannot find the according solution with DaVinci Resolves Stabilizing tool - built for far more difficult tasks. After many hours of tests and trials I would like to ask for your advice.

Is there a workflow to stabilize the high frequency trembling/jittering of scanned 16mm footage?

How does Blackmagic proceed to do so with the scanned footage of the Cintel Scanner?

Thank you very much for your attention. Any hint is highly appreciated.

Best regards,

Claus Peter

scanned film footage

16mmFootage.JPG (163.08 KiB) Viewed 5832 times

You're talking about gate weave.

You'll probably have better luck stabilizing it in Mocha or in After Effects.

You're talking about gate weave.

You'll probably have better luck stabilizing it in Mocha or in After Effects.

I agree. Or Fusion, it is free....

You can try to select only the black inbetween line as reference for the tracker and see if you can stabilize on that (tilt only)...

Hi Lee, hi Walter,

Thank you very much for taking my request in consideration.

I will follow up your recommendations.

In my opinion it is astonishing that one cannot find tools (be it a plug-in or a standalone software) that takes care of the usually quite simple and defined task to make use of the sprocket hole for stabilization.

Perhaps I am wrong and it isn't too simple: Yesterday I found out that in DIAMANT, an extremely high priced restoration software, you CAN find the option for sprocket hole stabilization. If you make use of this filter the result isn't satisfying at all.

Let me check out and come back again here.

Regards,

Claus

Yesterday I found out that in DIAMANT, an extremely high priced restoration software, you CAN find the option for sprocket hole stabilization.

Yes, and too bad BMD killed REVIVAL. As a MochaPro user, I would likely mask out the active image area and track the frame lines X-Y only. Stabilize.

jPo

In my opinion it is astonishing that one cannot find tools (be it a plug-in or a standalone software) that takes care of the usually quite simple and defined task to make use of the sprocket hole for stabilization.

Actually, any stabilization tool that allows you specify reference points for tracking can use the perfs, assuming the perfs are included in the scan. Just curious - what machine was your scanner made on? Our ScanStation does this internally (stabilizing using the perfs as references) for digital pin registration, and it's remarkably stable. No need to output an overscanned image and do a post-stabilization pass, because the scanner just does it automatically.

Stabilizing on the perf is going to get you the equivalent of a pin-registered scan, and if the camera was pin-registered, it should be as stable as one could expect.

Off the top of my head: AfterEffects, Premiere, Fusion, Motion, to name just a few readily accessible tools. There are more exotic pieces of software out there (our MTI DRS Nova setup has an awesome stabilization tool, but it's not cheap nor is the learning curve particularly gentle).

-perry

Hello, sorry to revive such old post, now with the revival fx, could BM add a generic preset to stabilize gate weave of scanned footage ?