  We investigate the accuracy of the parametric recovery of the line-of-sight
velocity distribution (LOSVD) of the stars in a galaxy, while working in pixel
space. Problems appear when the data have a low signal-to-noise ratio, or the
observed LOSVD is not well sampled by the data. We propose a simple solution
based on maximum penalized likelihood and we apply it to the common situation
in which the LOSVD is described by a Gauss-Hermite series. We compare different
techniques by extracting the stellar kinematics from observations of the barred
lenticular galaxy NGC 3384 obtained with the SAURON integral-field
spectrograph.
