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Recently I took a video in a remote cave. Thanks to my 320 lumen headlamp there was a reasonable amount of continuous light for my DSLR, but the shaking is just too strong. The image stabilization in iMovie was not enough to smooth it out. Does anyone know of an especially small and light stabilizer? I suppose the answer is to bring a light camera, such as a GoPro, which has lighter stabilizers.

Or any other ideas about how to take stable videos while walking or crawling in a rugged cave? These are remote places, so ultralight equipment is a must.

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  • Hello, Norbert and welcome to the Video Production SE site! I think you'll have more luck getting help if you can be a bit more specific with your question. What are your requirements? What camera are you using? What is your budget? Does it have to be a certain type of rig (there are many different types that stabilize footage in different ways)? Etc. I hope that helps a bit along the way.
    – gburning
    Jun 15, 2015 at 12:06

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Is there blurring in most frames? (i.e. if you pause it, do most of the still frames that make up the video look ok on their own?)

If the shaking didn't blur out your image too badly, you might be able to recover something usable with ffmpeg's vid.stab filter. It has some parameters, like speed of camera moves to not count as shake.

IDK how it compares to what iMovie has, but if your video keeps some of what you want in-frame most of the time, and isn't blurred to hell, software should be able to give you something. (cropped to contain just the part that the camera kept in-shot for most of the frames).

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  • Interesting. Other than the foreground, most of the frames are sharp, so I should try image stabilization on a software level some more. Once per step, probably when I set my foot down, the whole frame is blurred. iMovie doesn't seem to have any adjustable parameter, but maybe I should try ffmpeg as you suggest.
    – Norbert S
    Jun 17, 2015 at 7:20

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