Video Editing Software Tips

One of the features that has been appearing recently is that of video stabilization. A few of the better known home video editing software brands have included an image stabilization function in their offerings and until now the results have been ok but it is not what I would consider a “make or break” point as to which one to buy.

Yesterday there was a press release from NewBlue FX which is a software company entirely devoted to the field of special effects. I have mentioned their products here before and they do make a range of excellent, high quality video effects products. Now because they don’t make their own editing software they design their software to work as an add-on to others. They are generally compatible with all of the well know video editing suites. (Check their site for your own software’s compatibility)

Anyhoo, back to the press release. They have just announced the release of NewBlue Stabilizer which is a purpose built video image stabilization plugin. It comes in at around $100.00 and before you choke on that for just a plugin… read on.

Until now only the very top end video editing software was able to achieve any real image stabilization without a result degradation of the picture. The reason for this is that the software has to do some pretty amazing calculations of what is in the picture, what moved that was not supposed to move and what moved that should have moved!

The software quite literally has to inspect the position of every pixel in a frame and compare that pixel’s position in the previous frames and subsequent frames and try to work it all out. All in all it is a huge task. The result is that any shake or unintended movement introduced by the cameraman can be smoothed out… But it doesn’t end there!

The result of that smoothing process will be that the picture itself will have lost resolution with the addition of a slight blurring of features within each frame. What happens next is that the software has to compare all the lines and features in the original to what it has now and go back to fix those to restore the sharpness of the original.

Up until now, with moderate use of inbuilt stabilizers many consumer level video editors have achieved some passable results but nothing to write home about. The NewBlue Stabilizer has changed all that and really does deliver the goods by completing the task beautifully without any degradation that I can see to the resulting image quality.

As I said, the price tag is around $100.00 for the plugin but if you really want to smooth out some shaky shots then this is the only one I know of at this level that will do it well.

You can take a look at product for yourself by clicking the link: NewBlue Stabilizer