Motion smoothing in Final Cut Pro

I was asked to do a presentation to some non-video types about the new developments in DSLR video last week. It occurred to me that explaining why the footage from these cameras is so nice is kinda hard unless you understand the concepts of Depth Of Field and the way the eye/brain views/decodes things. To make it easy on the audience I quickly shot and edited something with lots of shortDOF work in it and a little grading to match the footage and give it a suitable ‘summery’ feel.

Here’s the original one:

After the presentation (which went pretty well, they got the idea) I came around to doing a few exports of various sizes for my backups and deleting the raw footage to save space on the old laptop. As it was a nice short bit of footage I thought I’d have a go at sorting the annoying camera-shake that you get with shooting handheld which was only made worse by the flowers waving in the breeze.  After a little search around in FCP I found the ‘SmoothCam’ plugin. This is a basic version of what Motion offers in terms of video movement analysis and restoration. All it really does is try to identify constant still artefacts in the frame (a bit difficult in my flowers clips I know), then tracks them throughout the clip using the movement as a cue for stabilisation by moving the whole frame to counteract the movement of the camera. Obviously this will leave bits of the frame unfilled if the picture is being moved about to it will zoom in a bit to re-fill the blank bit of the frame (a bit of a downside, but if you’re shooting in 1080 and exporting in 720 its not the end of the world). You have to tell it to analyse the clips in your footage bin which takes some time, but once you’ve done that bit they’re always analysed and rendered so no matter what you do to them they’ll always be happy to play. The way I did it was to edit the piece then work out which clips I used then only analysed them as it takes some time. Probably the most streamlined way of doing this is to do your edit then make new masterclips of the footage you used and then analyse only them as it’ll be literally only the frames you’ve got in your timeline. I haven’t tried that way but it’ll be worth investigating if you’ve got time. But enough of the overview, lets see how its done step-by-step.

Step 1. Get the SmoothCam columns in your bin. Right click on the info columns in your browser and select ‘SmoothCam’ from the list.

Step2. Select the clips you want to analyse, right click in the ‘SmoothCam’ column and ‘run analysis’. Go get a coffee.

Step3. bring up ‘SmoothCam’ from the Effects tab. Its in Video Filters/Video.

Step4. Drag the effect onto each clip in the timeline that’s been analysed.

Step5. Select the clip that you want to work on as you normally would with dealing with effects and you’ll see the ‘SmoothCam’ options in the Viewer’s Filters tab. Have a little play, I finded it useful to deselect the SmoothCam effect, watch the clip, then reselect it and see what’s its done in default. Then you can change the ‘Translation Smooth’ (horizontal and vertical smoothing) and ‘Rotation Smooth’ (you can guess what that does) to see how much your clip really needs to be fixed. I found the default of 2.5 to be a little strong as I still wanted some of that hand-held feel to it. ‘Mix’ gives you a mix of effected and unaffected footage, ‘Scale Smooth’ lets you control the push-in and pull-out of the frame that covers up the blank parts created by the stabilisation, ‘Auto Scale’ will do that but automatically.

so what does it look like? Here’s thing run through SmoothCam:

And here’s the original with the 2.35:1 ratio for comparison: