Apply Anti-Shake filter to an entire project?

[wordguy]

Hi,

I'm wondering if there's a way to add the Video Shake filter (VS10) to an entire project containing multiple files. I can only go through them one at a time at this point and it is very time-consuming.

Anyone knows how to do this, please let me know how.

Thanks,

W.

[Ken Berry]

AFAIK, all filters are clip-specific i.e. you have to use them on individual clips. The reasoning is that most of them will only apply to small portions of any one clip in any case e.g. parts where the lighting is wrong or more contrast is needed, so you don't want a shotgun approach which applies them to everything.

The only way I can think of to do what you want, is to actually render your project to one single video, and apply the filter to that. But there are a couple of provisos. The first is that this will work well if your project is in DV format and you produce one single DV file from several. As you will know, DV is high quality and essentially lossless. Producing a new file in that format will not involve transcoding to another format, which inevitably causes some degradation in quality -- particularly if you have to render it again later.

The second proviso relates to the anti-shake filter itself. I guess I am lucky in that my video camera has a built-in anti-shake feature which seems to work surprisingly well. Recently, however, I was dealing with some video from a friend's camera which does not have this feature. A couple of these clips had a bad case of the shakes, so I thought they would be excellent samples for testing the anti-shake filter in VS10+. I have to say, after repeated efforts, the end results were far worse than the originals (which were not good, but watchable, in the first place). I may have been doing something wrong, though don't think so. In other words, don't expect too much of that particular filter, especially if you want to apply it to your entire masterpiece. Others have also reported similar problems with this filter since VS10 was released. At most, it seems as though it may work only to relieve minor shakes in small parts of any clip.

[Ron P.]

I'll add to Ken's great wisdom...

The anti-shake filter should be a very good filter. Last year I purchased ArcSoft's Anti-Shake filter $80 US (IIRC), and compared the two. Ulead's done better then ArcSofts. One added advantage is Ulead's is free.

Now the downside is that the filter is lsupposed to be keyframeable. However you probably have noticed that when adding additional keyframes when customizing, they do not hold the values. This was something that I reported during beta testing, and Ulead neglected to fix. It has also been reported since public release, however I wouldn't hold my breath. This and several other filters, share the same problem.

I think that if Ulead fixed the keyframe problem, it would be a great filter.

Ron P.

[heinz-oz]

I would also like to add my comment to something that Ken Berry said in his post. It is incorrect that DV-AVI is a lossless compression. It appears to be lossless. This only applies to the first compression though. If you render a new DV-AVI file from edited DV-AVI clips, there will be a very slight quality loss. If you then edit that again and render to another DV-AVI file, you will notice the difference in quality.

The compression applied is about 10 to 11% and recompression (rendering) will discard detail from the original every time it is applied. Whether or not a rendered uncompressed DV-AVI file will retain its quality over several rendering processes is not clear to me, never tried it.

[Ken Berry]

Heinz -- point taken, although that is precisely why I qualified my statement by saying 'essentially lossless'. And I don't think it is just the (relatively) small degree of compression which is applied which keeps the degradation to a minimum, it is also the way the compression is done, which is apparently somewhat different to the method the compression is applied in, say, converting DV to mpeg-2. But as you say, there is some minor loss, but I too am unable to say how many times the same file has to be re-rendered before any degradation becomes visible to the naked eye, since I have never tried it many times over. Mind you, I recall John Hunter arguing the same thing nearly a couple of years ago now, about the degree of degradation in re-rendering mpeg-2 files also being relatively minimal if it were not re-rendered too many times...

[heinz-oz]

I didn't try to correct you, rather clarify a few details for the benefit of those that have not been around as long as we have.

I learned this lesson the hard way, right at the beginning of my video editing days. My hard disk real estate was nowhere near todays capacity and I didn't have a DVD burner either. They weren't even available then, at a price one could afford for the sake of a hobby.

I edited my first holiday DV video in small chunks and rendered to a new DV file. Later I combined the small chunks to something that would fit an SVCD disc. That, of course, meant that the previously rendered DV-AVI was rendered again to DV-AVI prior to creating the mpeg file for SVCD.

I noticed a considerable difference in quality for some of the clips that had been processed a few times. Looking again at the source material, the various steps in between and the final DV-AVI made me realize that, even at a virtually lossless compression, you do lose quality if you compress often enough.

Just didn't want someone else having to experience the same.