iMovie '09 Stabilization Comparison

Just a quick test of some of my parents vacation footage from this past year, to see how much of a difference the image stabilization in the new iMovie '09 actually makes.

I'm seriously impressed!

Category:

Entertainment

Tags:

• '09
• image
• iMovie
• stabilization

[McgregorKLB]

does you lose a little image quality by stabilizing it ?

[DWECerberus]

You do lose some quality. You lose more quality, the worse the source shake is.

The way stabilization works is the frames are all individually analyzed, and then each frame is individually rotated, and/or cropped farther into the image so that elements can match up from frame to frame.

So the steadier your source material, the less it will need to crop/rotate to stabilize. As you can see from my samples though, even fairly heavily stabilized video quality isn't degraded too terribly.

[elebobadilla28]

Amazing!!..This is what I need for my boys baseball games. Once it is finish can it be saved on a disk??

[DWECerberus]

Yep, it's easy with iDVD.

[yorbalindason]

Anyone who takes pictures of people with their butts in the air deserves to have a shaky shot.

[davewilson1969]

Thanks foor the time you put in to share this. great info, and much appreciatred.

[miamigroove]

wow...really cool! definitely worth any minor loss in quality

[ustoube]

of course..

[DWECerberus]

And granted, for now I'm only working with DV video, I've no idea how much HD/HDV/AVCHD would take, nor have I tried it with any h264 videos.

[DWECerberus]

I haven't tried it on my Macbook since upgrading to 4GB ram, but honestly I don't expect much difference. The analysis seems to be more cpu intensive than memory.

I've got another 7 hours of vacation video to go through that I've been putting off. Might be a good time to put it to the test, see if ram has any significant improvement on it's analysis speed. It definitely made a difference in how responsive iMovie is overall though.