A little while ago I embarked upon a project which was designed to provide me with some additional training aids for use over the winter in addition to my ongoing use of the excellent ErgVideo packages I have been using for some time. In order to develop some aids for my own use I needed to develop a system of producing reasonable quality video recordings from a helmet mounted camera. In order to produce decent footage it quickly became apparent to me that it was going to be necessary to use some form of image stabilisation software and with this in mind I started my experimentation.

There are a number of packages, some free, available for this purpose and I set about experimenting with these packages with mixed results. I had been considering for some while also replacing my personal computer with an iMac and having embarked on this project this seemed like as good a time as any to take the plunge. Given this purchase it was highly desirable that whatever image stabilisation system I settled upon should be available for both PC and Mac platforms.

After much searching I stumbled upon the package which is the subject of this ongoing review, the package is produced by proDAD and is called Mercalli V2, the package is available as a standalone package for the Windows platform and also as a plug-in which amongst other software will run with Apple Final Cut Express. The software is marketed by AV3 software and having read the documentation I downloaded the trial versions.

I experienced no problems installing the trial versions and so began my quest to resolve my image stabilisation problems using these packages, more as the story unfolds.