[Bf-vfx] Improving the 2D stabilization tool :: Demo Video

[Ichthyostega]

On 21.08.2014 01:19, Sean Kennedy wrote:
> I was up in Vancouver at Siggraph last week, so I've only gotten a chance to
> watch this video today.

> Really nice! Very impressive work, and Blender has definitely been needing
> some kind of scaling stabilization since stabilizing was introduced.
> I'd love to see these tools get into trunk. It's great that you took some
> good, real world video to demo on, video with all the problems typical
> stabilization projects run in to.

thanks, I really appreciate your understanding, and indeed, the real-world usage
situation can be rather insidious at times. Doing this example showed me that
it is possible to get acceptable results with what I've implemented thus far,
which makes me think it's the right moment to aim for review and inclusion
of this version, to get it in the hands of more people.

But it also showed me that the process is still laborious and the tool could
support the process of stabilising footage better in several ways; I'd like to
follow up on these, while I really hope to get more feedback to shape those
next ideas. To some degree, modest additional "automagic" could help, but I am
reluctant to engage in developing an elaborate automatic algorithm which turns
out to be not so helpful when put under real-world stress.

Bjorn (sunboy) commented already on the review page, and I will definitively
have a closer look into his add-on; a lowpass looks like one of these ideas
to be explored further -- a physical steadycam is likewise some kind of a
lowpass after all


> Are the keyframes you set in the Expected position tool panel viewable in the
> curve editor? I imagine they are, just want to make sure.

In theory yes. In practice no.
Let me explain. The animation system of blender is entirely generic, thus you
can animate (almost) all parameters found in the data blocks making up a blender
scene. Thus, if we use a persistent parameter and hook it up into the GUI, you
can press the "I" key and animate it through keyframes.

In fact, this system turns out to be more generic than what the GUI for
animation curve editing assumes. Meaning that this curve editor and animation
sequence handling makes some seemingly innocuous assumptions as to *where*
the animation data is attached -- and these turn out to be too limited.
Thus, if you have animation data attached to a property which belongs directly
to the 3D model, then the animation editor can find this data by descending
top level into the current scene. Unfortunately, our animation data is attached
to the post processing stages of the output graph (more precisely, to the
movie clip editing data) and from the looks the current setup of the
animation editors simply don't have this possibility "on the radar"

I haven't investigated that problem yet (and I'd appreciate any hint of the
more experienced blender coders); but off the top of my head, I can't see
why this should not be doable.

Cheers,
Hermann
(Ichthyo)