Hi,
VirtualDub does do rolling shutter repair. I had a go with that first, ignorant me and got horrendous results, with or without rolling shutter repair. The reason is that stabilization without borders does zoom in on the image, so you immediate lose resolution. The end footage is really messy and the coordinates move all over the place. In short, trying to track stabilized or corrected footage is much worse than going with the original, especially when you use variable zooming (which is essentially when your focal length changes during the footage).
Understood regarding “losing the resolution in the footage”.
Check with your footage as well. What blender essentially does is stretch the pixels around to compensate the distortion in the footage. So the “undistort” feature removes the k1/k2 distortion I think. Look at the original and the definition of the image you have and then check the final rendered footage. There’s a good difference. That’s why I’d prefer to do this by distorting the scene instead of undistorting the footage. I’ll have a look at the fisheye rig.
I’m not 100% sure, but i think it is possible to remove the rolling shutter distortions without stabilizing the video itself (so you won’t need to zoom in to hide the missing content on the borders).
Hm, actually, there might still be some black areas when the rolling shutter correction needs to pull the line a lot; but usually markers near the border of the picture aren’t reliable anyway.
I used After Effects and Blender to track a new lens I’ve been playing with.
Where I got the idea
The result
I shot this on my GH4 with an 8mm lens in UHD. Basically I just un-distorted it in After Effects using optics compensation. I wanted to keep the corner pixels so I just scaled down the footage 50%. So the frame for tracking was still UHD but I only tracked the center of it. Also I had to note that when I scaled down the footage I technically undid the crop factor. so an 8mm lens with a crop factor of 2.3 became an 18.4mm lens which scaled to a 9.2mm lens for the track (my brain hurts!). Then I just re-distorted the footage with the render of Suzanne and the cube. and Replaced the original plate to get rid of gross stretched pixels and bring back some resolution and sharpness. I don’t know how to fix rolling shutter though.
I’m going to run some more tests to see what can be done with even more distortion. Also, you don’t need UHD for this. Tracking 1080p footage is already really good.