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REVIEW:  ProDAD Mercalli

If you have been paying attention to PVC lately, you may have read my recent article “An Aerial Adventure.”  If you haven’t, go ahead and have a look.  I’ll wait.

There, now wasn’t that fun?  You may remember that my experience with Loran Nordgren and his AirCam aircraft wasn’t entirely successful.  While the pictures were certainly usable, even the combination of the Canon XL-H1’s optical lens stabilizer and the Kenyon Labs KS-8 gyro wasn’t enough to smooth out all the buffeting caused by being out in the wind at 70 MPH.

Software to the rescue!

Several years back I had the opportunity to review a set of transitions for Adobe Premiere Pro called ProDAD Vitascene.  The program is only one of several different production applications from the German software company ProDAD.  As luck would have it, one of the apps is a video stabilizer called Mercalli.  After my time in the plane, I had almost an hour of good test material to throw at Mercalli.

Versions of Mercalli are available for Adobe Premiere Pro, various iterations of Avid, Apple Final Cut Pro 7, Sony Vegas and other editors.  Installing Mercalli into Premiere Pro CS5 was basically automatic, and after installation I found the plug-in sitting in the “ProDAD” folder in the “Video Effects” bin.  Applying he effect was as easy as dragging the plug-in to the clip.

Mercalli expanded control panel

Once applied, the Mercalli control panel opened.  There are two levels of control, one which offers four preset levels of stability and an expanded panel which affords much more “tweakability.”  I couldn’t resist the urge to just drop in the presets, so the first one I picked was called “Glide Camera”.

Mercalli analysis window - notice the Task Manager window showing 8 cores at 100%.

Once you select the effect, the program starts analyzing the clip to determine how much effect to apply.  An impressive aspect of Mercalli is that when it is analyzing, it uses every bit of the computer to get it’s work done.  On my eight-core HP z800 edit box, all eight processors were running at 100% during analysis.  Unfortunately, Mercalli is not (yet?) cognizant of the CUDA/Mercury Playback Engine, so for smooth playback you do have to render the effect, but the time it takes is absolutely worth it.  The effected shot has a flowing, dreamike quality that is mesmerizing to watch.

Next Page:  Examples!

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I tried using stabilizer built into Vegas 10 Pro on your footage. I used default options.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=doHduozpcFY

Vegas 10 Pro is available for $140 for users of earlier versions.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/05  at  01:24 AM

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How does Mercalli compare to Final Cut Pro’s Smoothcam, Vegas’s stabilizer, and After Effects’ stabilization options?

It would be great to have a single shoot-out-style article comparing all of those along with the other major options (doesn’t Magic Bullet make a stabilizer)?

Most of us own or have access to more than one stabilization option, and/or are willing to invest in a new one, so a big article showing which stabilizers work best under a variety of conditions would be invaluable.

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  11/07  at  09:07 AM

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here’s my Smoothcam example- not FCP but Shake

http://www.stefansargent.com/helicopter.html

Posted by Stefan Sargent  on  11/07  at  11:14 PM

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Thank you for your nice review.
Unfortunately I have to advise that I’m having great problems with Mercalli.
Very often the procedure of analysis stop without giving any result, sometimes final cut pro crashes. But the really worst think is that I have contacted the customer service explaining anything was going on. First time the answered me that they didn’t understand what was going on and later they simply just NOT ANSWER ME.
So I sadly have to say that the investment really didn’t worth. Terrible customer service. Maybe I have some problem on my congiguration but it was simply impossible to clear it out

Posted by .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)  on  03/10  at  11:23 AM

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