Sometimes you just don’t want to use a tripod. Maybe you want a tracking shot that follows a character through a building, or maybe a once in a lifetime shot is unfolding before your eyes and you don’t have time to get the tripod out. Or maybe, like me, sometimes you’re just being lazy. Handheld shots have been used for a long time in film, but even with the weight of a huge camera and film reel acting as a counterbalance, there was always jerkiness involved. Forget about getting smooth handheld footage with a little consumer video camera; everything ends up looking like a scene from The Blair Witch Project.
To rectify this problem, a lot of cinematographers use a steadicam, which is a device built on a system of ball bearings and springs that takes out a large portion of the seizure-inducing shake associated with handheld shooting. Unfortunately, these contraptions are extremely expensive, and require extensive training (as well as strength and stamina) to operate properly.
Thankfully, Dynapel, manufacturers of high-end video processing hardware, have come up with an alternative solution in the form of post-production video stabilization. Gooder Video has taken Dynapel’s algorithms out of the hardware realm and turned them into a stand-alone program called SteadyHand. SteadyHand works by tracking specific points on the screen, and then analyzing that tracking data to see where movement should and should not occur. For example, if you’re shooting video of a sunset over the horizon, this program will see that there is always a straight line in the middle of the screen (the horizon) and will move your video up and down and rotate it so that the horizon stays level throughout the shot. This makes for a much more pleasant viewing experience, and adds an air of professionalism to your video, since it looks like you used an expensive steadicam for each shot.
The layout of the program is so simple that even a digital video newbie should be able to figure it out without a manual.
Ease of Use
This is one of the easiest, most user-friendly pieces of software I’ve reviewed for MFM. The installation is a flash, and since it’s a stand-alone program, there’s no worrying about putting it in the right plug-in directory, or fishing it out of a selection menu of similarly (or confusingly) named plugins. The icon for the program appears on your desktop, you click it, and there it is. From there, you simply tell the program where the video is that you want processed and hit Start. If your video isn’t suitably smoothed out, you can choose a stronger algorithm, which renders slower, but takes out more shake.
This panning shot is supposed to be a serene glance at room decorations, but it is ruined by shakes. SteadyHand saves the day by doing an excellent job of turning it into a calmly fluid shot.
Depth of Options
There aren’t too many options in SteadyHand, because it really only serves one function, which is to stabilize shaky video. However, there are some important features “under the hood” so to speak. There are the two preset levels of Motion Correction: Normal and Strong. However, you can click on a “Custom” setting to adjust the level of each aspect of the motion correction, including horizontal and vertical stabilization, zoom smoothness, and rotation correction. I found that I used the “Custom” setting nearly 100% of the time because I didn’t like what the Zoom correction did to the shots (it looked too artificial to me). I also found that sometimes the Rotation parameter needed to be set to “0” to avoid micro-judder that occurred when processing very jerky video.
