Deshaker

Deshaker is a lightweight plugin designed for VirtualDub that allows you to remove camera shake as well as improve panning, rotation and zooming.

The plugin can be installed by simply copying it into the plugins folder of the video editing application. After a quick restart, the plugin can be found in the filters section. It runs on a simple process that is more or less effective, by identifying the rotation, zoom and pan of a current image and applying changes in order to make it similar to the previous one, which is done by matching blocks of pixels.

Deshaker displays all its options in one big window, making everything easy to access. The plugin works with two passes in order to simulate the optimal camera motion and allows you to select the source pixel aspect that affects both of them. You can choose between square pixels, standard PAL and NTSC, anamorphic, SVCD and HDV.

The passes contain parameters for image matching such as block size, scale, used pixels, initial search range of the image size, differential search range and others. It’s possible to discard motion for blocks that have specific characteristics which you get to define, as well as ignore pixels from any of the four borders.

The plugin can also help you deal with the effects of rolling shutter. It’s able to take the video from a wide range of cameras and attempt to correct the inconsistency between the frames. Deshaker comes with a feature that allows it to remember discarded areas to the next frame which means that it will ignore areas that are similar from one frame to the other.

Deshaker is able to correct camera shake but at a cost. Using it with an interlaced video, the result will look softer compared to a progressive one as the plugin individually resamples the interlaced video fields.

To sum things up, Deshaker is a plugin that you can certainly and easily use to correct video material but it does take a decent amount of know-how to use it properly.