A screenshot of the Final Cut Pro Browser and Background Processes windows showing the SmoothCam Analysis in progress. Click the image to see it at a legibly large size.
I ran around the
South by Southwest festival last week shooting behind-the-scenes video of my cousin AJ and his band on my
Canon HV20, stabilized with a
Steadicam Merlin. I’m still learning to use the Merlin –it is a fantastically engineered piece of kit, but it takes a light touch to float it about, and it’s much easier to use for choreographed moves than for impromptu run-and-gun documentary-style shooting.
Final Cut Pro and Motion both inherited a feature from Shake called “SmoothCam”, which is a motion stabilization filter. SmoothCam analyzes movement within a clip and moves the frame around to compensate for high-frequency movement while preserving the lower-frequency moves –i.e. it tries to remove bumps and vibrations while preserving smooth, intentional camera movements. I ran a few tests on some of my relatively smooth clips, and SmoothCam seemed very good at doing exactly that.
When the SmoothCam filter is applied to a clip, that clip is put into a queue and Final Cut Pro begins to analyze the motion in the clip. Once FCP’s analysis concludes , the SmoothCam filter will have data to use for its calculations and its effect will finally become visible. One can then adjust the SmoothCam settings and see the results instantaneously (with a computer of sufficient power).
I’m happy to note that it is possible to have Final Cut Pro analyze the motion of a batch of clips, and then later if the SmoothCam filter is applied to any of these clips its results can be seen without delay. The motion analysis data for each clip is written to disk alongside the clips themselves.
Since I may or may not want to use the SmoothCam filter on many of my clips, and I don’t plan to do any more editing on my computer tonight, I’ve set FCP to batch analyze the motion in all of my footage from the last week. To do so, I enabled the “SmoothCam” column in FCP’s Browser, selected all the clips I wanted analyzed, right-clicked in the column and chose “Run Analysis” from the clip’s contextual pop-up menu. Now the analysis is puttering away, and tomorrow I can play.
The things one can learn by glancing at the manual!
Technorati Tags: Apple, Batch Processing, FCP Tips & Tricks, filmmaking, Final Cut Pro, Garbanzo Beans, Image Stabilization, Macintosh, OS X, SmoothCam, software, vfx
