SteadXP - Do You Have One?

[webrunner5]

7 minutes ago, Hans Punk said:

Windows PC - but the software is available on mac (and I think Linux can be requested).

To be clear the SteadXP is a half hardware, half software solution. The little SteadXP box attaches to your camera and records accelerometer data via one channel of the audio track of the recorded video from the camera. Once auto-synced and processed through the SteadXP software, the decoded data (recorded as telemetry audio pulses) is translated into a corrected displacement mesh for the video footage to be displaced by. The end result is a corrected video that can be exported from the software at various codecs for ingest to your NLE of choice.

https://steadxp.com/

 

 

So on a PC you can export from the software either ProRes or CinemaDNG to your NLE?? I am trying to figure out how hard the workflow is. I am too old for crazy stuff LoL. ?

[shooter]

21 minutes ago, Hans Punk said:

 

SteadXP works great for cameras that do not have IBIS, yet can shoot higher than HD resolution - so that the inevitable post cropping of the software will not impact to drastically on the final image quality.

4K?

Only to correct hand shaking for 4K recording with handheld use - do you have any estimated number how does the resolution end with the crop?

[Emanuel]

1 hour ago, wolf33d said:

You are right too. Shaking the camera like crazy is not real use. I think if you use your camera steadily like you would do let's say with a GH5 that has IBIS, you will get insane result with Stead XP. In fact better results than IBIS. 

The only pain is post processing and why not include a FCPX / Adobe plug in that does everything in one clip for the clips that you select..... 

Excited to see your review.

Yeah, I will update you in a week or so... Hold your horses, guys! : -)

[Hans Punk]

1 hour ago, shooter said:

4K?

Only to correct hand shaking for 4K recording with handheld use - do you have any estimated number how does the resolution end with the crop?

The greater the stabilisation needed, the greater the crop will be to hide the edges of your footage from being ‘in shot’ after correction.

So shooting at a higher resolution (such as 4K+) on a wider lens would be beneficial in most cases, since any post crop introduced from the software would have a negligible effect on resolution, or nil impact if delivery is HD.

The nice thing about the SteadXP software is that it allows full override control of the stabilise intensity, with options to keyframe just the sections in need of maximum stabilisation. In other words, a slow keyframed post zoom can be set to hit the crop amount needed to clear the stabilised edges of the frame - then the crop amount can be dialed back to slowly regain the wider FOV. The features of the SteadXP software are too rich to exist as a simple NLE plugin, the power and customisation options in processing the footage needs its own application to exploit the full power of the correction method.

Using SteadXP to stabilise handheld moves or jitters from a small camera is not really the best use of the system IMHO. It is too much of an involved process to have for what could be addressed with a gimbal these days. Where the SteadXP really shines is when used in dynamic situations such as filming out of a helicopter or rigged to a car/bike or when the camera is on a helmet rig and you need to iron out a lot of bumps and shakes from a relatively compact setup that does not require mechanical stabilisation on the camera mount.

I suspect the initial excitement over SteadXP dropped off due to the swell of gimbals and IBIS enabled cameras...as well as people being put off after learning that a separate workflow of lens calibration/hardware setup and software processing have to all be done correctly just to get to the corrected footage stage. It is not a ‘click and analyse’ post stabilisation solution that many had assumed or wanted it to be. The SteadXP guys themselves have not particularly pushed the media section of their site to appeal to dummies, so there is a little bit of research required elsewhere online from other users to figure out how to achieve the best results.

I personally think the SteadXP fills a specific niche that is yet to be bettered. Using a hardware/software solution is a pretty unique method for a prosumer product...the results are relative to the time spent finding and exploiting its advantages over mechanically stabilised solutions. It is not a magical solution that will appeal to all, but I’m keeping mine for a while - as it can be deployed for a few situations that are not simply practical to achieve with my Ronin-S.

[kye]

It is a very effective product.  I do a lot of stabilisation in post from hand-held shooting and SteadXP absolutely creams most of the post-processing stabilisers.

This would actually be a very good match for the BMPCC4K, depending on the technical aspects of the workflow.  If you're going to shoot and do significant post-processing like this then shooting RAW at 4K would be the best place to start from in order to get the best results once you've rotated and cropped the image.

The best way to help is to add some mass to the camera so it doesn't shake so much in the first place.  OIS is good for this, as well as any kind of rig.

It is a bit of a funny proposition in the marketplace though, OIS can smooth the small jitters, IBIS can smooth small and medium jitters, gimbals can smooth large, medium and maybe small jitters (depending on intensity) and post-processing stabilisers an do large and some medium jitters, so there isn't that much of a gap in the stabilisation options as there used to be when they designed it.  I use IBIS and post-production stabilisers and that mostly gets the job done.

It is killer for action cameras and tiny cameras like RX100 though.

[androidlad]

9 hours ago, kye said:

It is a very effective product.  I do a lot of stabilisation in post from hand-held shooting and SteadXP absolutely creams most of the post-processing stabilisers.

This would actually be a very good match for the BMPCC4K, depending on the technical aspects of the workflow.  If you're going to shoot and do significant post-processing like this then shooting RAW at 4K would be the best place to start from in order to get the best results once you've rotated and cropped the image.

The best way to help is to add some mass to the camera so it doesn't shake so much in the first place.  OIS is good for this, as well as any kind of rig.

It is a bit of a funny proposition in the marketplace though, OIS can smooth the small jitters, IBIS can smooth small and medium jitters, gimbals can smooth large, medium and maybe small jitters (depending on intensity) and post-processing stabilisers an do large and some medium jitters, so there isn't that much of a gap in the stabilisation options as there used to be when they designed it.  I use IBIS and post-production stabilisers and that mostly gets the job done.

It is killer for action cameras and tiny cameras like RX100 though.

I personally find that floaty ultra smooth movement kind of offputting.

GoPro Hero 7 Black essentially has a "SteadXP" like device built-in.

[kye]

11 minutes ago, androidlad said:

I personally find that floaty ultra smooth movement kind of offputting.

GoPro Hero 7 Black essentially has a "SteadXP" like device built-in.

I agree, and you can definitely over-do things.

I shoot hand-held for my home and travel videos but the shots I tend to create in the edit are locked off shots, pans, tilts, or maybe a slider shot to reveal something or add movement.  Sometimes they are hand-held because I'm following a person or whatever, but I try and stick to the normal shots because I want the video to be about what I'm pointing the camera at, not the film-making techniques.

Stabilising things is great, but ultimately if it's wrong for your project then it's wrong, regardless of how technically impressive it is.

[Walter H]

32 minutes ago, androidlad said:

I personally find that floaty ultra smooth movement kind of offputting.

@Emanuel I would be very interested in your review if you touched upon the ability to lessen/strengthen the stabilization effect, if that is a possibility and how effective it is. 

Often when I stabilize in post, I knock the effect down to between 20-30% to "take the edge off" w/o creating that floating feel.

[agarabaghi]

Reviving a very old thread, but has anyone actually used it? 

I got mine to test with a Zcam E2. Ive created my profiles (not as bad as i expected) but no matter what resolution i try *(120 or 23.97) with the corresponding profile, i get audio sync failed. 

I tried AAC / PCM / NONE for encoder on the audio file 

[Emanuel]

Yes, I have one. But sincerely I didn't have opportunity to test it yet. I don't have it with me where I am now. Seems solid, though.

[Jermaine]

has anyone tried this with a camera that has ibis?

[Anaconda_]

1 hour ago, Jermaine said:

has anyone tried this with a camera that has ibis?

I'm fairly sure this won't work. The SteadXP records the movement of the camera, and then counteracts that in post to give a stable image. With IBIS, the movement of the camera is different from the movement of the sensor, so the recorded data won't match the footage.

I'm still hoping camera manufacturers build the gyrodata into the recordings, or as a companion file. That would give the steady results and would still work with IBIS, since the data comes straight from the sensor, not a 3rd party box in the shoe mount.

[herein2020]

17 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

I'm fairly sure this won't work. The SteadXP records the movement of the camera, and then counteracts that in post to give a stable image. With IBIS, the movement of the camera is different from the movement of the sensor, so the recorded data won't match the footage.

I'm still hoping camera manufacturers build the gyrodata into the recordings, or as a companion file. That would give the steady results and would still work with IBIS, since the data comes straight from the sensor, not a 3rd party box in the shoe mount.

 

I'm still hoping for something like that too. GoPro's Hypersmooth and DJI's RockSteady technologies are pretty incredible.  A lot of the mirrorless cameras might already have the necessary technology since most of them have an electronic level, I'm assuming that's tied to a gyroscope. Of course this will never happen, but if they all collaborated on an open standard metadata file (kind of like the subtitle srt standardized format) and NLEs got on board as well, it would be awesome to be able to just import the footage and the metadata file and dial in the level of stabilization in real time instead of having to analyze the footage.

[dgvro]

Yeah when I started to understand how the SteadXP achieved it, I started wishing the actual cameras would make it possible without the middleman by recording the data. But they won't see much of a viable demographic in people who are willing to go off doing that "extra" step. (Not really extra at all in my view of course since I know I'm forever at the mercy of whether my footage needs NLE-based stabilisation in post)

Each brand's more professional cameras will be aimed at people for whom this is redundant because they simply shoot with professional level solutions i.e. fixed shooting on tripods, shooting on steady-rigs, all the way down to even just people using gimbals maybe.

Each brand's more amateur/casual demographic will be seen as people who never want the inconvenience of going off to NLE tinkering with this data and just want a no-fuss decent IBIS/digital stab baked in

[dgvro]

16 hours ago, herein2020 said:

 

I'm still hoping for something like that too. GoPro's Hypersmooth and DJI's RockSteady technologies are pretty incredible.  A lot of the mirrorless cameras might already have the necessary technology since most of them have an electronic level, I'm assuming that's tied to a gyroscope. Of course this will never happen, but if they all collaborated on an open standard metadata file (kind of like the subtitle srt standardized format) and NLEs got on board as well, it would be awesome to be able to just import the footage and the metadata file and dial in the level of stabilization in real time instead of having to analyze the footage.

I think an even closer analogy than SRT subs is just how different cameras RAW photos, slightly different though each manufacturer's type of file may be, can all be opened in an editor app and uniform corrective edits (the usual stuff baked into a JPEG like where to reduce Chromatic Aberration etc) applied based on profiles known from each camera model

[Anaconda_]

2 hours ago, dgvro said:

I started wishing the actual cameras would make it possible without the middleman by recording the data

Blackmagic previously announced it, I think with the Ursa Mini cameras. But then they went silent and it never happened. I'm probably wrong, but I imagine either it doesn't work in practice as well as they'd expected, or there's a patent on that kind of thing and it's not worth fighting over. 

The patent would explain why nobody has ever tried it.

[herein2020]

3 hours ago, Anaconda_ said:

Blackmagic previously announced it, I think with the Ursa Mini cameras. But then they went silent and it never happened. I'm probably wrong, but I imagine either it doesn't work in practice as well as they'd expected, or there's a patent on that kind of thing and it's not worth fighting over. 

The patent would explain why nobody has ever tried it.

That would make sense. The part I don't get though is why e stabilization in $3K mirrorless cameras is nowhere near as good as GoPro's Hypersmooth. I get the GoPro's sensor is tiny by comparison (maybe that is the full explanation), or maybe it is too costly to risk the R&D costs needed to make it work with no guarantee customers will buy into the system just because of the feature. 

I can see this being the next area where cell phones start to overtake dedicated cameras. They can already livestream, email, record pictures and video at the touch of a button, etc. They also already have all the sensors and processing power needed to make this work. All Apple needs to do is implement the same AI that GoPro did and you'll have Hypersmooth type footage coming from cell phones.

I always say cell phones are our biggest competition; not bit rates, frame rates, WB, shutter speed, resolution, <insert the gear you don't have here>

[LeBurx]

Is there any semi-hardware alternatives to SteadXP for cameras without IBIS?

[JANGER]

On 2/4/2020 at 3:53 AM, agarabaghi said:

Reviving a very old thread, but has anyone actually used it? 

I got mine to test with a Zcam E2. Ive created my profiles (not as bad as i expected) but no matter what resolution i try *(120 or 23.97) with the corresponding profile, i get audio sync failed. 

I tried AAC / PCM / NONE for encoder on the audio file 

Did you solved problem with audio track?

[Owlgreen]

Are there any new users of the Steadxp? Some of the results impress me greatly. Seems like a cumbersome workflow, but very possibly worth the trouble. Too bad it can't input and output Braw. 

Anyone looking to sell their device?