Thanks to Brian's suggestion, and the WOW factor in how well ProDad's Mercalli stabilized some of his skiing footage, I've downloaded the trial demos of Mercalli version 2 plugin and version 3 stand alone programs. I've also looked at quite a few YouTube videos re: Mercalli and other stabilization programs. Mercalli looks good!
I ran Mercalli 3 on a 3 minute 14 second clip in less than 10 minutes. 53 seconds of the tail end of the same footage took about 40 minutes to run Warp Stabilizer in Premiere. In addition, every time I made any new changes to Premiere, it took 40 minutes or so to render all over again, every time, while my laptop gets hotter and hotter.
As far as I can tell, Mercalli did as good a job, if not better. I don't know if Adobe's Warp Stabilizer is adjustable or not, but when I set up Mercalli for Rock Steady camera the results were fabulous - except for occasional bits of black edges popping up every now and then. I now know I could have avoided that if I had clicked a setting that would have zoomed in instead of losing edges.
I've read a lot about the comparison between versions 2 and 3. The ProDad site says Version 2 is the latest... but Version 3 does things 2 does not. Like handle 4k files. Not that I have a 4k camera, but I believe the latest Hero has 4k capability.
Version2 is a plugin and does work within Premiere Pro CS6 and After Effects, both of which I happen to have. That's nice, I guess, but I wonder about system resources. Does it make sense that running the stand alone version 3 would be easier on my laptop than the plugin with either of the Adobe programs open?
Re: file saving. I'm guessing that with plugin version 2, you save as you would normally save any Premiere or After Effects file, with the huge assortment of choices. Version 3 only offers small, medium or large file size of mp4 or a .mov QuickTime file. Not sure about quality settings with QuickTime.
It is easier to see what you're doing in Version 3. In Version 3 you can pull sliders (in and out points?) so as to only stabilize a portion of footage. Maybe you could also do that in Premiere. Not sure yet. Version 3 can do batch processing. Not sure I'd need that.
The ProDad site says there is a 20% off all regularly priced software but the coupon won't work for me with Version 3, which essentially makes both about the same price since the coupon does work for the more expensive Version2.
Which would be better?
thanks,
Paz