@majumder Thanks! I tracked the corner of a sprocket hole to stabilize, but I noticed that there’s some subtle movement at the edges of the gate - perhaps a clue that the film had a registration issue in the camera originally, or maybe that’s just par for the course with 8mm of that vintage. The camera control software I use produces a set of debayered TIFF images that I import into Davinci Resolve. Resolve automatically treats the sequence as a clip, which I lay down into a timeline and then stabilize in the Fusion workspace. Generally a Tracker node (to track and apply tracking data) followed by a Transform node (to rotate) and then a Crop node is all that’s needed to produce a reasonable looking frame. After that I take a pass on the clip in the Color workspace and then it can be exported.
The trick with getting the tracker in Resolve to work well for the task of stabilizing the frame with this kind of motion was dialing in the mechanics/optics of sensing the sprocket hole. If Resolve has to search a large area for the tracking point(s) the odds that it will make a mistake go way up. I was getting footage that could be stabilized for a few frames, then it would jump around. The precision was very bad (almost unusable) with the full beam from my sprocket sensor, but I cleaned it up with a pinhole and it improved greatly, i.e. Resolve only had to look at a relatively small area for tracking. I suspect that reducing the size of the pinhole more will have the effect of further improving the stability of the image.