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SmoothCam Filter
Up to Final Cut Studio 2
During a recent shoot, we had 3 cameras. Two were on tripods, and one was hand-held. While I was editing I found the hand held a little too jarring, and so i kept trying to edit around it, until....I was leisurely reading the FCP User Manuel (yes, i know), when I stumbled across the SmoothCam Filter.
It's quite simple to use. Select the clip(s). Choose Effects > Video Filters > Video > SmoothCam.
The clips process, and viola, a little better.
However, it isn't all magic. To reduce the shaking, the clips are enlarged enough to cover up the steadied movement resulting in them being slightly blurry.
The manual offers a few tips. First, the SmoothCam should be the first filter before anything. Then you can adjust the Filter Parameters. You can decrease the Auto Scale so that it zooms out. There's also the option to control the steadiness of the shot by three independent parameters: Translation (left, right, up, down); Rotation (around the center point of the image); and Scale (forward or backward camera movement).
Scale seems to be the main culprit behind the distortion that I'm hating, but again, this can be fixed by the Auto Scale I mentioned above, or by the three parameters I was just mentioned. By reducing all three, less motion correction is applied, and less black around the clips, resulting in needing to scale less (big breath).
A few other tips offered by the manual include isolating the clips with the most movements with cuts, especially when there are noticeable changes within the frame (like before someone enters frame, and before they exit).
Seems like it takes a lot of work, but when you're just not happy with everything you shot once you're back at your computer editing, at least fixing little visual things like this will help you focus more on your story.
It's quite simple to use. Select the clip(s). Choose Effects > Video Filters > Video > SmoothCam.
The clips process, and viola, a little better.
However, it isn't all magic. To reduce the shaking, the clips are enlarged enough to cover up the steadied movement resulting in them being slightly blurry.
The manual offers a few tips. First, the SmoothCam should be the first filter before anything. Then you can adjust the Filter Parameters. You can decrease the Auto Scale so that it zooms out. There's also the option to control the steadiness of the shot by three independent parameters: Translation (left, right, up, down); Rotation (around the center point of the image); and Scale (forward or backward camera movement).
Scale seems to be the main culprit behind the distortion that I'm hating, but again, this can be fixed by the Auto Scale I mentioned above, or by the three parameters I was just mentioned. By reducing all three, less motion correction is applied, and less black around the clips, resulting in needing to scale less (big breath).
A few other tips offered by the manual include isolating the clips with the most movements with cuts, especially when there are noticeable changes within the frame (like before someone enters frame, and before they exit).
Seems like it takes a lot of work, but when you're just not happy with everything you shot once you're back at your computer editing, at least fixing little visual things like this will help you focus more on your story.
Re: SmoothCam Filter
Yay! This filter originally came from Shake, the advanced compositing software usesd on Lord of the Rings and King Kong. I use this from time to time and it's pretty amazing. It's used in Shake for other purposes, too. You can use it to temporarily "lock down" a shot, even if it's moving and zooming, so it's easier to add effects. When the effects are done, the shot is returned to its original shakiness and the effects are translated, rotated, and scaled to match the footage.
Long story short, if Final Cut can't do it alone, pass it off to someone with Shake!
-Dave
P.S. - Shake can also stitch together three images into one giant panorama automatically... even if those three images are all handheld!!!
Long story short, if Final Cut can't do it alone, pass it off to someone with Shake!
-Dave
P.S. - Shake can also stitch together three images into one giant panorama automatically... even if those three images are all handheld!!!
Re: SmoothCam Filter
There is another option as well besides the smooth cam filter in final cut or the smooth cam node in shake. Earlier this year a stabilizer was introduce into a program call syntheyes. Granted the program is mainly meant for camera tracking for insertion of 3d into live action, however it also has some nice image/vid prep tools one of which is a stabilizer. Like the prior tools, some scaling of footage is done to keep black bars from showing and it does include two different modes of stabilizing. Of course the final output quality is dependent on how bad the initial footage is. Aside from syntheyes, I do use shake as well, howerver I've not used it's stabilizer feature yet so I can't speak as to how well it compares to the other stabilizing methods. If you want me to run some footage through the syntheyes stablizer to see how it compares let me know (again it is mostly for moving shots, but the stabilizer should work on your hand held shot as well).
Andrew
Andrew
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