So, we've all been there. You have a foreground and a midground. in a shot where you want to remove camera wobble. Problem is, your foreground subject is moving! The analysis of the plugin gets confused and tries to lock onto the moving subject and in turn forces the mid/background to move eradically as an output.

I used Virtualdub with Deshaker. I found it very good but it was a SAL and required rendering when complete, and also has trouble recognising many off camera formats. Also a far from pretty UI.

BUT ... it did have the ability to limit the analysis to only one section of the frame. It was such a good feature!

My question - does any of the stabilisation plugins or native software out there allow for only part analysis of the frame? I'm pretty sure Vegas Stabilisation and Mercalli V3 do not.

Apologies if this is an obvious answer -- After Effects, if you're willing to invest the time to do it.

The basics of using stabilisation are actually really straightforward. You could learn it in 10 minutes from YouTube even if you've never used AE before. But the program can take a while to process.

OK thanks, sorry if this is really obvious in return - Can After Effects be used on it's own? I use Vegas. So in AE, you would import, stabilise and render out. Then re-import to Vegas?

Yep, exactly.

Looks great! Exactly what I need sometimes!

Here's a tutorial on it, should others find it useful!

After Effects Tutorial: Stabilize Video Footage on Vimeo