Image stabilization

[Jeff Kilgroe]

Holding RED as a shoulder-mounted rig should minimize most stability issues like the shakes and twitches you get with smaller camcorders. Kinda like others have said, the mass helps and most other broadcast cameras don't have much for stabilizing features. Some jumps and jitters can be corrected in post, but you usually have to crop in on the frame and it's hard to correct for those really quick motions that blur.

Anyway, I think that from an ENG/EFP perspective, the manual focus (incredibly innovative focus assist feature not withstanding), is going to be your biggest obstacle for run-n-gun situations. But if you can pull it off, you should have some of the finest looking news footage out there. :)

[Daniel Reichenbach]

Image stabilisation works well for still photography, it works well for filmed helikopter shots (Giromounts, Westcam) but in most of the cases, it would be better to go on a dolly, crane, tripod... exept you shoot action stuff or use it as a stylistic element. For stabilising FCP is not the right tool, I use After Effects, Combustion or Digital Fusion. But: "Let's fix it in post!", is in most of the cases rubbish, time consuming.

[Nick Shaw]

The FCP image stabiliser is pretty much useless. Shake is very good. You have the standard stabilize node which uses trackers, and also the SmoothCam node which uses optical flow analysis. The latter gives very good results, but is pretty slow at rendering even at SD. Alow for a lot of rendering time at 4k!

Nick

[Joshua Provost]

Yeh, stabilization is not usually an issue for many uses of the camera. For narrative production, you will be on a tripod, on a dolly or jib, on a steadicam, or have a shoulder mount of some sort. It's all very smooth and the operators are experiences and have steady hands to boot. It's very different than your standard handheld handicam that requires some for of OIS to look decent.

[Gavin Greenwalt]

Even with all the additional resolution, if you stabilize anything more than rotational drift or very very minor changes you're going get hideous results.

Also don't shoot with anything longter than 1/60sec shutter. Anything more and the motion blur becomes apparent inside of the stabilization.

Parallax will kill the best stabilization algorithms. Sure your forground is nice and steady but why is the Golden Gate Bridge floating around?

[Brook Willard]

I don't mean this to sound condescending, it's just a question: Beatniq, have you ever operated a significant cine camera handheld?

[this really sounds like I'm being a jerk; I promise that I'm not]

[Steve Gibby]

I don't mean this to sound condescending, it's just a question: Beatniq, have you ever operated a significant cine camera handheld?

[this really sounds like I'm being a jerk; I promise that I'm not]

I don't mean this to sound condescending, it's just a question: Brook, what were you thinking?

(It does sound like you were being a jerk, but since we know you're not, you're excused!)

LOL...

[WesG]

I've used the attachable Canon stabilisers on B4 HD Canon lenses on XDCAM HD cameras and they are great.

This is a great addition when doing any helicopter of boat shooting, however I don't think these attachable stabilsers will be able to mount on 35mill lenses!??!?!

For those of you considering RED for ENG work at 4K and need a way to stabilise RED with the RED zoom, what will you do???
What's a way to stabilise for handheld/shoulder run and gun style work???

Gyros??

[beatniq]

I don't mean this to sound condescending, it's just a question: Beatniq, have you ever operated a significant cine camera handheld?

[this really sounds like I'm being a jerk; I promise that I'm not]

No I haven't. Was it that obvious? :)

[Brook Willard]

Heh, nah, that's not the way I meant it. I was just trying to figure out how to interpret the question:

Option 1: You thought that a full-sized cine camera would succumb to the same kind of vibration that a handy-cam would.

Option 2: You were familiar with the way a cine camera handles on one's shoulder but you were looking for something beyond that.

Option 1 has been covered, I was trying to come up with some cool solution for option 2. :D

And Gibby... :)