Terror Tram: Horror Comes Home @ USH HHN'07 (Halloween Horror Nights 2007, Universal Studios Hlywd.)
Channel: DanHarkless ﴾Halloween, theme parks, YTPs, & more﴿
Date: 2016-09-22

On this Thanksgiving day [when the original version was posted] I am thankful both for the plethora of wonderful Halloween attractions in So. Cal., and for the availability of open source software such as Gunnar Thalin's brilliant Deshaker plugin (http://guthspot.se/video/deshaker.htm) for VirtualDub (http://virtualdub.org/). I figured when I shot the TV screen footage in the moving (might say "violently lurching") tram this year that as long as I could keep the screen within frame that I should be able to use some video stabilization software to do an adaptive zoom to re-anchor that bopping-around TV image to the center of frame. Unfortunately it turned out that the crippled Stabilize plugin Sony ships with Vegas Pro 11 is effectively useless, but a little research turned up the amazing Deshaker plugin for VirtualDub.

I first tried using the New Deshaker for Sony Vegas plugin, but unfortunately it's based on an older version of Deshaker and is missing some options like the ability to disable or adjust scene detection and turned out to be unusable for the challenges of this footage.

I then moved on to using the latest version of Deshaker in VirtualDub itself.  You have to be careful of luma values getting messed up when converting from NTSC DV's 4:1:1 color space to a color space the utilities and codecs (other than DV) handle natively (I comment some more on this in later videos), but once you have that worked out, Deshaker really lets you achieve a lot of artful correction in a kind of fun computer-human collaboration process. It takes a lot of time to learn all the options (documentation is better than the average these days but is limited and sometimes vague) and especially how to use them effectively together for a given footage situation, but if you take the time to do the tuning, you can really get some great results from this plugin. Again, need to be particularly thankful to the authors of Deshaker and VirtualDub for releasing their tools as (free) open source.

Deshaker turned out to work so well once I got through the tricky process of getting it tuned that I ended up using it not just on the scenes where I was filming the TV screen in the moving tram, but on almost all the footage in this video. The part where I walk through the "Psycho" sets and so forth on the back lot is not quite up to Steadicam levels, but it does look like I have the camera on a wheeled dolly with a pan/tilt head, rather than just bobbing up and down on my own two legs. I experimented with cranking the smoothing all the way up to Steadicam levels, but unfortunately you run into a problem where the uncorrectable image distortions (all objects in frame smearing in the direction of movement) you get when the camera gets jerked around end up being disconcerting if they occur without any corresponding camera motion. Therefore I set up Deshaker to only do mild smoothing to horizontal panning and to rotation (though I was able to crank the vertical motion smoothing way up) -- that way, the image smears end up mostly properly aligning with mild horizontal or rotational movement and your brain's image processing system doesn't get all jarred.

Speaking of which, I'm stoked that thanks to Deshaker, I don't have to repeat the general "this video may give you motion sickness" warning that I gave on the 2006 Terror Tram videos. However, the deshaking process does unavoidably introduce some visual artifacts, so if you are someone who is *especially* prone to motion sickness, I would recommend you watch this video in normal mode rather than full screen. Everyone else, feel free to full-screen away.

That being said, Deshaker worked so well on this video that I'm probably going to apply at least mild correction with it to all my Halloween maze and theme park attraction videos from now on. It should work even better once I get to my true 1080p source material.

Shot 2007-10-19, at the Terror Tram: Horror Comes Home attraction at Universal Studios Hollywood's Halloween Horror Nights 2007 event.