Technology still has the power to appear like magic. And one place we may desperately need magic: straightening out our horribly shaky, handheld video shots. Software makers like Apple have already offered up some techniques for doing this - in the case of Apple’s Final Cut Studio, optical flow analysis attempts to track the image as it shakes around the screen and compensates by adjusting the orientation of the frame. But a research team at the University of Wisconsin, partnering with Adobe, will present a new approach at the legendary graphics-geeky SIGGRAPH conference in August. They go one step further, applying a 3D mesh to the image to warp your image three-dimensionally to make the stabilization even more seamless.

Me writing about it is basically useless. Check out the mind-blowing results in the video. From the description:

In this paper, we describe a technique that transforms a video from a hand-held video camera so that it appears as if it were taken with a directed camera motion. Our method can adjust the video to appear as if it were taken from nearby viewpoints, allowing for 3D camera movements to be simulated. By aiming only for perceptual plausibility, rather than accurate reconstruction, we are able to develop algorithms that can effectively recreate dynamic scenes from a single source video. Our technique first recovers the original 3D camera motion and a sparse set of 3D, static scene points using an off-the-shelf structure-from-motion system. Then, a desired camera path is computed either automatically (e.g., by fitting a linear or quadratic path) or interactively. Finally, our technique performs a least-squares optimization that computes a spatially-varying warp from each input video frame into an output frame. The warp is computed to both follow the sparse displacements suggested by the recovered 3D structure, and avoid deforming the content in the video frame. Our experiments on stabilizing challenging videos of dynamic scenes demonstrate the effectiveness of our technique.

The research, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:
Content-Preserving Warps for 3D Video Stabilization

You can view all the techie details there, as well as many more demo videos. This is promising stuff, and we’ve seen in recent years a vast acceleration of the time between academic research and shipping commercial products — especially with cheap computational power on home computers to play around with, and increasing challenges for software vendors to differentiate what they’re doing in a mature application space.

Side note: boy, do I want to go to SIGGRAPH this year.

Also along these lines: Spacetime Fusion, tests of Final Cut’s SmootCam feature, more SmoothCam tests

For those of you purists, yes, it’s still worth considering the art of steadicam shots - at least before technology obliterates it for us clueless masses. Previously: B&H Interviews Steadicam Inventor: Shooting is Like Dancing

I’m in the middle of editing a video that combines an artist interview with event footage. The supplied raw material is 10 minutes of interview footage and 45 minutes of the event, shot from a single camera. From that footage I was able to extract 5 minutes of usable interview, but just 40 seconds of the gig. It’s not that the gig video was badly shot, it was just homogenous. Medium-long shot of people dancing. Medium shot of the DJ. Over the shoulder shot of the DJ. Medium shot of girls dancing. Repeat.

This is sad, because a single camera and half an hour is plenty of time to capture a dynamic performance. The secret sauce? Close ups.

Segue - Reset (Live at Big Day Out) from Jaymis on Vimeo.

This is getting close to the absolute minimum possible for a cheap, fast music video.

2 guys, a camera, a strobe light, and a bottle of Jägermeister.

This contains all of the elements that make the quick, single shot video effective: It’s a unique concept, it’s fast and cheap to make, it will grab your attention and evoke a strong reaction, and it’s very personal. The video is for local Brisbane band DZ, who are grabbing some mindshare and attention despite being yet to release an album.

I spend a large portion of every day watching music videos, and this is the first one to have really captured my imagination since the beautifully animated, high budget “Wood” by McBess. To me, these wildly disparate works of art are both equally valid, and equally effective as music videos. However, the fact that The Mess Up took, conservatively, less than 0.5% of the time to create, means that the artists are free to create more work, and influence more potential fans (also check out their live video, including a fantastic cover of Justice - Phantom Pt. II).

There is still plenty of scope in our industry for detailed, careful, high-budget work, but if it doesn’t have that spark of originality, then you might as well drink a bottle of Jager and throw up on the floor.

Nine Inch Nails have been on tour around Australia with the Soundwave festival, and their artistic director Rob Sheridan has been along for the ride, and took his Canon 5D MKII on stage at various venues.

Full HD Version from Nine Inch Nails.

Screw resolution charts and slow focus pulls on flora, this is how you test out a camera. Take it up on stage with crushing noise, blistering lights, smoke, sweat, and guitarists flailing around. The 5D has taken it all in stride. All of the videos are available for download in 1280×720. That’s a 650MB file for the above video.

Obviously Sheridan’s close collaboration with Trent and NIN has allowed him to work in a way which many artists would find intrusive. Weaving amongst the performers, and handling the manual focus with aplomb, he’s pulled off the most realistic, personal concert footage I’ve seen for a long time.

Update: Here’s a crowd view of the same performance, including Rob moving around the stage. Interesting to remind yourself how a “normal” camera deals with concert lighting.

I’m a little incredulous that I haven’t posted about La Blogotheque before. The French crew have been putting out their intimate live music podcasts or “Take Away Shows” since 2006. Their philosophy is obviously something I’m super keen on:

Every week, we invite an artist or a band to play in the streets, in a bar, a park, or even in a flat or in an elevator, and we film the whole session. Of course, what makes the beauty of it is all the little incidents, hesitations, and crazy stuff happening unexpectingly. Besides, we do not edit the videos so they look perfectly flawless, instead we keep the raw sound of the surroundings. Our goal is to try and capture instants, film the music just like it happens, without preparation, without tricks. Spontaneity is the keyword.

They’re about to film their 100th episode, and in 3 years they’ve worked with some absolutely fantastic artists, putting out work with real humanity and emotion.

The latest? Oh, just Tom Jones.

Tom Jones - Green Green Grass of Home - A Take Away Show from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

Each show has lovely explanatory notes, beautiful embedded HD video from Vimeo, and they also allow high quality download of all their videos. Great for projection at parties, or a quiet night in with some great music.