I have been working on remastering some of my older videos to bring them up to new standards. My videos range from ancient lip-stick camera and 8mm camcorders to GoPros. All of various eras of equipment will have their own challenges to remastering and some of them I’m just not going to make the time for the effort required. But I am going to make an effort.
The video above is from 2007 where some of the usual suspects of the time rode from the Cuyamaca mountains over to the Lagunas by way of the Deer Springs and Indian Creek trails. It was about a 40 mile day of great fun!
This video was shot with a 1080i Canon HDV camcorder. It shot good video with the exception of the image stabilization. It used optical image stabilization which was consider really good for the time. However it was optimized for handheld work and not for the rapid bouncing around that occurs during use as a helmet camera work. I’m pretty sure that the optical image stabilization often made things worse not better. It certainly did not work as well as the electronic image stabilization that was on my previous standard definition camcorder setup.
I had previously remastered my Galbraith Mountain video from 2009 but did not try to do any software stabilization of the video. Many moons ago I tried software stabilization and did not like all the artifacts it created in the video.
For the Cuyamaca – Laguna video I gave the software stabilization another shot. I’m using Adobe Premiere CC 2018 and it has warp stabilizer effect/filter built in. After a bit of trail and error I found some setting that work well enough. There is a balancing act that has to be done with with the 1080i footage between smoothness and clarity. The filter will do a good job of stabilization but at the cost of cropping the footage. When the footage is cropped the clarity of the footage is decreased. I found that trying to keep the crop below 125% typical kept thing looking good. Some scenes I did not stabilize at all. Overall I’m satisfied enough with it as it is better than the windows media format stuff I was previously using. There will be some more of this coming in the future.