Casio Z750 video postprocessing.

 

As I am a rather great fan of Casio Z750 as a very capable take-everywhere camera I have found myself using its video recording much more than I expected. Of course it is no way a DV camcorder but it seems that I can catch more precious etc. moments which would have missed if I would rely on camcorder and be such a fan to carry DV everywhere...

I find the video quality rather decent for home video usage except several issues. One day I tried to find a quick (and free) solution for 2 issues:

1. Rather noisy image under low-light conditions;

2. No image stabilization at all- and why we all stretch out our hands and like to look at LCD while shooting...

Both of these are rather bad so I took a look at VirtualDub (homepage) filters I had not used so far. And it seems to me that with practically no effort it is possible make Casio videos times better :-)

1. Fast and acceptable cleanup can be done by Jim Casaburi's 2D Cleaner (optimized by Jaan Kalda) filter;

2. The other is Gunnar Thalin's deshaker filter.

As a quick reference some short video shot at Benalmadena, Costa del Sol, Spain last spring:

This was original video out of camera. (click image to view video - size ~1MB)

This is after 2D cleaner with rather heavy cleanup (25 and 5 and 5) (click image to view video - size ~1MB)

This is the final result- both filters applied. (click image to view video - size ~1MB)

All those clips are displayed without sound and are rather heavily compressed with DiVX 6.1 codec (single run with 1200 kbps) to get the filesizes low so the result is rather blocky but I guess that You all can get the idea...