Use of time remapping to stabilize the velocity of a rotating object?

Question

I have a video of myself inside of a human-powered rotating drum. This video's shot at 60 frames per second, but due to to the unreliable velocity of human operators, this drum rotates at different speeds throughout the video. I need the drum to rotate at a constant speed for use in a video installation.

I'm wondering if there's a processing technique (perhaps in after effects) I could use to programmatically stabilize the speed of this drum, maybe by use of a tracking point on the drum's edge. What I'm doing right now is overlaying eight equally-spaced diameters on top of this video, and attempting to get a constant amount of rotation (one-eighth of a turn) every thirty frames through premiere's speed ramping tools.

Unfortunately, this is not an ideal solution as even within one-eighth of a rotation there are speed variances and minor starts and stops that do not produce a stable rotation.

Does anyone have any ideas on how to approach this? Attached is a picture for reference.

Answer 1

One thing you could do is track the rotation of the drum, so that it's virtually stabilized and then use a Null-object to drive the rotation of the layer. This would give you a fresh, new, smooth rotation all the way through.

Answer 2

Use mocha to track the drum of the machine, but mask out its contents. Mocha can handle rotation of planar surfaces, and there’s a lite version which ships with AE. Use the stabilize module to even out the movement.