Now that high-end smartphones offer quality (VGA resolution, 30 frames per second) comparable to amateur digital camcorders, many people including myself often use them for casual video recording. Even though recent S60 3rd Edition smartphones offer software video stabilization, results aren't satisfactory and the recorded clips are still very shaky.

During the last summer, as every year, I spent 10 days in the mountains and to reduce the number of gadgets I carry with me and somehow limit the weight of my backpack (my Canon dSLR + a set of lenses gives me enough trouble), I decided to leave my miniDV camcorder at home and only take the E90. I recorded some 3 GB of video in total and the quality was in most cases just enough for such 'holiday footage'. The only problem was unbearable shakiness of the recorded clips, be it my shaky hands or the camera itself...

I started looking for a solution, preferably a free one. I found a really good one and I think it's worth sharing with other cameraphones' users as it DRAMATICALLY reduces (or actually eliminates) camera shakiness and makes panning, rotation and zooming smoother. And yes, it's FREE.

First of all, you need VirtualDub - a powerful freeware video capture and processing utility for Windows. It has an extremely extensive support for external plugins, and there are literally hundreds of free plugins available, letting you further improve (enhance colors, adjust brightness, denoise, apply filters like e.g. "old movie with scratches", etc.) and modify your video recordings.

Secondly, as VirtualDub itself doesn't import MP4 files, you need another freeware utility: MP4Cam2AVI Easy Converter to convert your MP4 clips to AVI format accepted by VirtualDub. The conversion is lossless (as it's actually just changing the file format without re-encoding the video) so it won't affect the quality of your clips.

Thirdly, and lastly, you need the fantastic and freeware (similar, commercial solutions cost $60 and more) VirtualDub plugin called Deshaker - the actual stabilizing engine.

After you download all the above mentioned components, first launch MP4Cam2AVI Easy Converter to convert your clips. Batch conversion is supported, so you can do it once for all your clips and have it done automatically while you're doing something else.




Install VirtualDub and then extract the Deshaker plugin from the ZIP archive and simply copy Deshaker.vdf to the plugins directory of the VirtualDub folder.

Run VirtualDub and load your video using File -> Open video file menu. To enable the Deshaker plugin go to Video -> Filters and in the Filters window click "Add" and select "Deshaker 2.2". Click OK.

Now you will see a window with lots of options, but don't worry. You can start with keeping most of them intact and only then you can experiment with them if you want to get even better results.




The most important setting for videos captured using a smartphone is the left panel: set "Source pixel aspect" to "Square pixels (1.0) and "Video type" to "Progressive scan". Just in case, also change the path of the Log file from C:\ drive to some other location (e.g. D:\Deshaker.log) and mark the "Append to file" option as the plugin sometimes "forgets" to create the log, which is required for the second pass of the stabilization.

Now you can close the plugin settings window by clicking the OK button and then once again OK in the Filters window. Now you're ready for the actual stabilization.

To do the first pass, simply click the "Play to output" button located at the bottom of the VirtualDub main window (the third button from the left marked with " >O ". The clip will be played back in the right (output) window and you'll see various dots and lines appearing during the playback.




When the playback concludes, you have to go back to the plugin settings (Video -> Filters, select the plugin in the window and double-click it or press "Configure" button). In the Settings window, the only thing you need to do is to click the "Pass 2" button in the upper right part, which will switch the plugin to the second pass. Close the window by clicking OK and then once again OK to close the Filters window as well.

If the right video window on VirtualDub's main screen now turns black and there's a "This frame was not processed in pass 1" message, this means that there was a problem with creating the log file (mentioned earlier). In such case, go to the Deshaker plugin settings window and change the location of the log, and then re-start the pass 1 phase by playing back the clip (" >O " button) again. If you see normal video in the right window, it means that pass 1 was done successfully and you're ready for pass 2.




Now the final part: select codec and its settings for your processed video. It is important to select a proper codec as it'll affect both quality and compatibility. Select Video -> Compression menu and choose your favourite codec. DivX or XviD may be a good choice as they're very popular providing compatibility with different players and operating systems/devices, and at the same time offering good quality at acceptable file sizes. In the codec settings, set the highest bitrate supported by the target device you want to play your clips on to achieve the best possible quality. Click "OK" to close the Compression window.

Last thing to do: to start the second pass of the stabilization and save the resulting video to disk, select File -> Save as AVI from the menu and wait for the plugin and codec to do their job. Done! Now play back the stabilized video and enjoy nearly optical-stabilizer quality effect!

Click here do download a sample movie (low quality to save bandwidth, but clearly showing the difference). Original video on the left, stabilized video on the right.