If you don’t always happen to have a tripod on hand, you’re going bring a lot of shaky shots back to your edit suite. Can you fix them in the mix? The Mercalli plug-in from proDAD offers that luxury, promising to stabilize many kinds of shaky footage without a steep learning curve. I shot tons of jittery shots, which is nothing unusual for me, and then set out to see if this plug-in could set me straight.

Mercalli couldn’t be easier to use-you simply find its effect icon in the Video FX window, drop it on a clip in the timeline, and you’re ready to go to town on its customization dialog box. The Mercalli Light version ($59) supports standard-def footage, while the Expert version (in my opinion, an overpriced $119) lets you stabilize all manner of HD clips. Also included in the package is Video Shaker, adept at accomplishing quite the opposite of Mercalli.

Both the Light and Expert versions of Mercalli can be used in fully automatic mode. You can also tweak their parameters to your heart’s content, independently adjusting motion detection, amount of camera stabilization, camera balance and motion. It even lets you pick the part of the frame to stabilize. In between auto mode and super-anal tweaking, there’s a variety of pre-set profiles with settings for certain situations, such as static scenery, helmetcam, shooting from a vehicle, and my favorite, “simulate tripod.”

The results are sometimes surprising, and other times disappointing. For scenes that needed just a slight amount of smoothing, especially an unsteady waist shot of a person standing in front of a static background, this plug-in nailed it, creating rock-solid clips that looked like a tripod was used. Shaky footage, such as a hand-held zoomed-in shot of a jet flying overhead, didn’t fare as well, looking herky-jerky, probably beyond repair by any software at any price.

Mercalli is no miracle worker, but it does an admirable job of smoothing out reasonably unstable footage. It does this by first analyzing the clip’s motion, applying its stabilization counter-movements, and then scaling up the video to cover its edges. The more stabilization accuracy you select, the longer the clip will take to render, but the processing was remarkably fast, even on a mid-range laptop.

If you’re spoiled by the silky-smooth, near-miraculous motion tracking of $150,000 editing software such as Autodesk Flame, you won’t be impressed by Mercalli. But if you need to smooth out a few shakycam shots where somebody forgot to tote the tripod along, this little plug-in might pay for itself by avoiding just one re-shoot.

Charlie White, a regular Studio/monthly contributor, is a television producer/director with 34 years of experience. He is the deputy editor of the NBC technology and consumer electronics site DVICE.com and the co-host of the Coolness Roundup on Sirius satellite radio.