I recently finished my first wedding videography, which you can see on my wedding page, and read more about my experience here.
While I was editing on my Mac station in Final Cut Pro, I used several image stabilizers: Smooth Cam, Magic Bullet Steady from Red Giant, and a free-trial version of CoreMelt’s Lock & Load X. The difference I found between these plug-ins was interesting, and despite one of their names, makes you realize there is no substitute, or magic bullet, for having stable shots from the beginning.
Plug-ins can only do so much, even though they may promise more. The key is to get stable shots from the get-go, but if you can’t, these little guys can help.
But which one is better?
Well, it’s not that easy of an answer. On the first clip above I liked Magic Bullet Steady the most, but the second one, Lock and Load X did the best job of detecting foreground and background differences. (All of these tests were done with basically the default values of the plug-ins.)
I was definitely not impressed by Lock and Load X’s rolling shutter artifact reducer, in some instances it actually exaggerated the rolling shutter artifact!
Here is a comparison chart from CoreMelt’s website, that I found at least one inaccuracy on, which was that Magic Bullet Steady was about as fast as Lock and Load X in analyzing footage:
