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Stabilizing Your Video Footage, Part 2

Jul 20, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer

Boris Continuum Optical Stabilizer

Boris Continuum Optical Stabilizer ($99) is competent, and it offers features unavailable in the Apple products, but its complex interface makes you wish that it came with an Easy button.

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Stabilization Routines Compared View side-by-side comparisons of SmoothCam, Boris, and Magic Bullet.

Here's the workflow. After applying the effect, you choose your Mode, with two basic functions: Stabilization and Smoothing. The former is designed to lock down your footage, the latter to smooth motion. Three other visual modes let you see the motion vectors in the video, see the motion samples in the video, or manually set up a region within the clip to analyze. This latter feature lets you exclude regions that don't provide motion cues that well, like the sky or water, which speeds your analysis and makes it more accurate.

Next, you choose whether to to track X and Y axis motion only (Translation), or track X and Y plus Rotation, or those three plus Zoom. If you decide not to zoom into the video to eliminate any black bars caused by the smoothing, you can choose a color to fill the gap, leave it transparent, repeat pixels on the edge, or reflect or tile the pixels adjacent to the edge. I almost always zoom, but if you prefer not to, these can be useful options that aren't available from either Apple alternative.

Then you choose whether to Auto Scale or not via a checkbox, and then your rendering quality options. I used the highest possible setting for all tests. Boris also exposes some Optical Flow configuration options which I didn't experiment with, but might prove useful if you're working with problem footage that isn't resolved using the default settings. Also available is flicker reduction, which I didn't need, and a Mixing option which I kept at the default setting.

Nothing too onerous complexity-wise, but count on spending a few minutes reviewing the helpful PDF file that comes with the program before stabilizing your first clip.

In stabilization trials, Boris worked well, but with Auto Scale selected, the effect zoomed into the clip more than necessary to eliminate the black edges, as you can see in the comparison with Motion in Figure 5. Not a huge deal, but scaling always involves some quality loss, so you want to scale as little as possible. I was able to fix the problem by unchecking Auto Scale and adjusting the positioning and scaling manually, but auto is always better, and Boris should have been able to match Motion and my manual efforts automatically.

In smoothing comparisons, Boris does a nice job eliminating horizontal, vertical, and rotational motion in the video, but it doesn't smooth out the speed of the pans and zooms, which SmoothCam appears to. This kept Boris from getting an Excellent in this category.

I also ran into some stability issues with Boris. Specifically, when creating my comparison sequences (like that shown in Figure 5), if I added the titles and overlays before applying the effect, it crashed during the analysis or render stage. As a simple workaround, I could apply the effect and analyze, and then apply the titles and overlays, which worked fine.

Overall, while Boris wasn't up to Apple's quality in my test clips, the program offers several features unavailable in either Apple product, like configurable edge appearance, the ability to adjust optical flow controls and a user definable analysis range. You can try the program before you buy for several weeks, so if SmoothCam or Motion isn't working for you, or if you need a faster solution, give Boris a try.

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