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Stabilizing GH3 Video For Sony Vegas | |
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Date: 19/5/2015 Tags: video | I have a GH3 camera that takes pretty nice video. Because I cheaped out and got a non-Panasonic prime for the lens, I don't have in lens stabilization. What I do have is a bunch of footage that needs stabilization so I've been looking around for software based solutions. The first (free) one I heard about was Blender and it's point tracking. After downloading that and playing around with it I found it very limited in what footage it can work with. As soon as you pan or zoom it becomes very difficult to keep the footage zooming and panned correctly. There are scripts to help but because it's not core functionality it just gets complicated fast. Then I heard about Deshaker, which primarily runs as a plugin for VirtualDub. A tool which I haven't used in a very long time. So I downloaded both of those and got to work testing it on my footage. Immediately it was obvious that it was vastly better and more powerful that Blender. The first issue I faced when using VirtualDub was that the input video was .MOV files off the camera. This is the format from ffmpeg: Input #0, mov,mp4,m4a,3gp,3g2,mj2, from 'bec+tanner 038.MOV': Duration: 00:09:03.36, start: 0.000000, bitrate: 49552 kb/s Stream #0:0(und): Video: h264 (High) (avc1 / 0x31637661), yuvj420p(pc, bt709), 1920x1080 [SAR 1:1 DAR 16:9], 48004 kb/s, 25 fps, 25 tbr, 90k tbn, 50 tbc (default) Stream #0:1(und): Audio: pcm_s16be (twos / 0x736F7774), 48000 Hz, 2 channels, s16, 1536 kb/s (default) Stream #0:2(und): Data: none (tmcd / 0x64636D74), 0 kb/s (default)And VirtualDub uses .AVI files. Next step is converting the video to an AVI without re-encoding it. And that is best accomplished by my old friend ffmpeg. Which has the ability to convert between compatible containers without loss of quality and time caused by re-encoding the video. My initial attempt failed because the AVI container doesn't support big endian audio (the default off the camera). So I converted that to little endian using this command: ffmpeg -i "input.mov" -vcodec copy -codec:a pcm_s16le "output.avi"Now I could load my files into VirtualDub and stabilize them. The process basically involved adding 2 instances of the Deshaker plugin to the filter pipeline. The first one is set to "pass 1" and enabled. Disable the 2nd instance. Then go to the start of the video and runing the Output Playback mode. This generates all the motion vectors. Disable the first pass instance of Deshaker and enable the 2nd pass instance. Now you can export the video using your desired compression. I don't like any of the built in compressors so I downloaded the x264 codec and used that. But the output had a problem. When the camera panned to track people walking, they appeared to jump back and forth in the stabilized output. Very odd looking. So I went frame by frame and noticed that in the source video each pair of frames coming through was the same. Deshaker then would get confused by this and shift the intermediate copy of the frame by more than the new frame. I thought the best way to get around this was to delete these redundant frames from the GH3. Fortunately VirtualDub comes with just such a filter: interpolate ![]() By putting it in front of the Deshaker instances I got nice clean output, free of stuttering. At least as far as it would play in VLC. However when I loaded that into Sony Vegas there was big problems playing the AVI files back. Basically it would drop to a slide show, and on top of that there was corruption in the rendered output. Mulling my options I started looking for a way of getting the video out of VirtualDub without using the AVI container format. Fortunately there is a way. By installing an external encoder, which in my case was more just redirecting output to ffmpeg. I found that by adding the right external encoder you can call ffmpeg to encoder the video straight from VirtualDub. The process involves writing out a "ffmpeg-1.vdprof" text file with the content from that link. Then importing that into VirtualDub and editing the details a bit. I decided to lower the -crf parameter to 16 to make it pretty much visually lossless. I don't want the stabilization to drop the quality at all. Now I can bring that footage into Vegas and it plays smooth as butter. But it might have sent a few hairs grey. |
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Scribe Gmail Support Update | |
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Date: 4/5/2015 Tags: scribe oauth2 | Google has switched off so called "insecure" authentication methods, including "PLAIN", which Scribe relied on. Today I got that draft implementation working enough to be able to login to the Gmail IMAP server using OAuth2. It does take you via a detour into your default browser but in the end it works. It's also quite the hack job at this point so I want to clean up the code and make the error handling at least very verbose. I will be making a release in the next few days off the stable branch that includes functional OAuth2 support. It has been argued that Google's motivation in doing this is to force people onto the web and out of installed desktop / mobile clients, for the purpose of making Gmail's web UI more palatable. I remain unconvinced about this argument in that there seems to be another reason that makes more sense to me. OAuth2 doesn't require the client to store the plain text password. Thus reducing the possible points of failure for security. Most installed clients are bad at storing persistent account credentials in a fully secure fashion. So by removing that attack vector it could be argued that Google is doing App authors a favour. Maybe. I still find OAuth2 quite needlessly complicated. And it's very dependent on the client having lots of pre-configured knowledge about the server it's authenticating with. I mean for every service that Scribe will support OAuth2 authentication I have to have a unique ClientID and ClientSecret, as well as the token URI and access URI... none of which are "discoverable" on the fly, but hard coded in. So you can't connect Scribe to some arbitrary new service that supports OAuth2. I have to manually create support each new service. I don't yet understand how that is a reasonable state of affairs. |
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Scribe Gmail Support | |
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Date: 24/4/2015 Tags: scribe | So Google have changed the authentication support for Gmail again, breaking the ability for Scribe to log in to any of the Gmail related services. Which means I'm going to have to put aside the v2.1 work temporarily to work on getting one of the support authentication methods working in Scribe. The options are:
The list of all official SASL mechanisms is here. PLAIN-CLIENTTOKEN is not mentioned at all. I wonder what implements that? Also of note, both XOAUTH and XOAUTH2 are marked "OBSOLETE". Nice one Google, supporting only obsolete, undocumented or non-functional authentication methods. |
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Scribe v2.1 Update | |
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Date: 21/4/2015 Tags: scribe | It may look like nothing is happening but really, there is. I have been toiling away on features and bug fixes in the v2.1 "trunk".
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The Current State of Scribe | |
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Date: 23/2/2015 Tags: scribe | Maybe it's time to just bundle OpenSSL in Scribe? I'm thinking of statically linking it so that it's always available and there will never be any trouble with missing or mis-matched libraries. The downside is the download size will blow out a bit. Over 2 MiB for the Windows build, maybe even 3. Recently I've had a very bad time with people have all sorts of weird crashes, odd behaviour and connection issues. And it seems that these things are next to impossible to reproduce. Maybe it's the target market changing on me as the profile of the client gets higher. One of those odd behaviours is Scribe not saving it's settings between sessions. I suspect this has to do with the install folder being write only, but the software thinking it's in portable mode (i.e. store settings in the install folder). I'd love for someone to be able to reproduce that and tell me how. So I'm going to look into ways of avoiding pitfalls. I'm starting to think that making automatic crash reporting default to "on" is for the best. I'm simply not getting enough data to respond to problems. The HTML editing functionality is coming along nicely. I managed to send quite a few HTML messages over the last few weeks. But it's still pretty flakey. And also there are some thorny issues to sort out. However it's a lot better than even a month ago so there is hope. Also I finally fixed an old crash in the GWindow destructor on the Linux/GTK2 build. The other main sticking point there is the popup handling under the GTK2 platform isn't great. But I didn't see the point in tackling that when the software was still crashing all the time. Edit: So I think I've worked out the procedure for the not being able to save your settings bug:
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Scribe v2.1 | |
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Date: 27/1/2015 Tags: scribe | So the v2.0 builds are basically stable as far as I can tell. Although there is some issues with some people connecting to SSL servers and one report of a crash at startup on MacOSX 10.10 (which I'm investigating). In the light of that I'm shifting my attention to the features in the v2.1 branch. I want to go through the things I'm aiming to get into that release:
I'm looking to get the first build out sometime in Feburary. |
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