Tricky stabilization problem`

I have a lot of hand-held camera footage of aircraft and wish to stabilize it.

The problem is that when I use the cloud tracker (classic) it is easy to see that Resolve is analyzing some of the noise (or perhaps H264 compression artifacts from the AVCHD footage) and treating them as tracking points which tends to screw things up quite badly due to all the random inputs to the tracker. This occurs even against a clear blue sky.

My thought was to de-noise the footage and/or use an edge-detect then drop the remaining noise below the black-point with the lift control in grading. I did this and got a very clear outline of the aircraft I wanted to stabilize it seems that the tracking is done *before* any grading so is still working with the original (noisy) footage.

There's no "threshold" adjustment or anything like that to filter out the noise so I'm a bit stumped.

I did try using the point tracker but the problem is then that there aren't may "points" to track, simply edges and corners which are constantly changing orientation with respect to the camera. Simple pattern matching won't track these points accurately so as the aircraft turns in the air, the points stop tracking and the operation fails.

The utterly crazy thing about this is that if I throw the exact same footage into Vegas, it stabilizes almost perfectly - but I really don't want to be going back and forth just to perform a single operation.

I see that Fusion gives far more control over stabilizing by way of its far more configurable tracking options -- but that would also add a huge extra amount of time to the workflow.

Any suggestions from those who have perhaps been down this road themselves?

If you use the 15th version, you can use the Fusion tab. Apply a Blur node or Remove Noise node.
They will applied before tracking.
After tracking done you can remove these nodes.