Sometimes you couldn't bring a tripod, gave your best to keep the camcorder steady, but you had to zoom in and the built-in stabilization left over some movements.
Shaky movies can be stabilized afterwards on the PC, but it's a frowned upon option for purists: You can choose between cut-off blocks appearing on the edges and crop them later, which leaves individual remaining pixels as they are (the most purist option), or loose picture quality by zooming in and hide the cuttings (the standard but most dirty option).
So, it's a pretty dirty thing to do! But if the shakying is mild and you don't care about some quality loss, or if the things you care about are in the middle and don't care about cropping, it's ok even for a purist.
Finally found a open source combination which gave good results and was not too complicated:
virtualdub + deshaker
The website of deshaker is quite self-explanatory, and there exist many good tutorials on the web (i got only german ones). I only want to put the hint.
Great bonus:
more recent versions of deshaker can also compensate for the ugly rolling shutter artifact, a design flaw that all CMOS based consumer cameras have. Deshaker can compensate for this, as long as the movement originates from the camera not the object. Fore more details on the percentage value check deshaker homepage (for my cam I had to pick 38% instead of default 88%).
my current material is interlaced. To minimize encoding/decoding (inherent quality loss), it's possible to deinterlace and deshake at once by simple putting yadif and deshake as the second filter in the filter chain. The deshaker first and second pass run in parallel with yadif deinterlacer (which had to do the same work twice). If you are abundant of disk space, you can deinterlace into a lossless container (such as huffyuv), and do the deshakeing on this one, this way speeding up things without quality loss.
