CS5 stabilized R3D's are blurry/unusable. Help!

Question

I've been researching this problem and trying everything I can think of for two days with no results. The issue is that R3D clips that are stabilized in AE CS5 export out as too blurry to use. And no I don't have motion blur turned on.
My workflow is to stabilze the R3D clip using the built in stabilizer and then to export it out using uncompressed settings whether quicktime or AVI or even Cineform. I place those clips on the Premiere timeline and they look terrible.
This is a real problem at this point because I have masses of aerial footage to stabilize and I have to find an answer. Although I'm going to now try Mocha, it does not accept native R3D files or Cineform so I end up having to encode to intermediate codec.
Can anyone point me in the right direction? Thanks.

Answer 1

I am surprized that no one gave you a correct answer.
In order to get good results from stabilization routines regardless of the software you are using is to shoot at a high enough shutter speed. The shutter speed depends on the lens you use. As a minimum shutter speed should be for times the focal length of the lens you shoot with. For example: if you are shooting with a 28 millimeters lens your shutter speed should have been at least 1/125 of a second. This of course depends on how much motion was in the original footage.
The frame rate has no relation to the ability to stabilize the footage. Only the shutter speed is what matters. The reason why footage looks blurry to you now is that after you stabilized it a motion blur caused by camera motion and and possibly the vibration of a helicopter is now visible and not masked by the movements of the image. When shooting from a helicopter I would recommend using as high of the shutter speed as possible as high as 1/1000 of a second or even higher. This of course will lead to rather stroby looking footage. You will have to either live with it or use a plug-in like Kronos motion blur or time warp without applying retiming but using a motion blur option with a 180° setting.
Another reason for you footage to look blurry now is that it is often necessary for the stabilization software to zoom in on crop the picture. This is by design. There is nothing you can do about it. The only way to workaround it is to reduce the amount of the motion stabilization applied to the picture. You would need to find a balance between stabilities and and the image sharpness. Also, there is a setting in a Premiere Pro CS5 for the resolution of the footage display. If you are setting is lower than the full resolution for either playback or paused footage,the picture can look significantly blurrier than it really is. This is done to ensure smooth playback, sometimes smoothness of a playback is more important than the sharpness of the image for the editing purposes.
Hope this helps, cheers.
Message was edited by: dkitsov, added a note about post Motion Blur