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:

A comparison of shutter speeds and techniques for slo-mo footage

Back in this article I rasied the question of which shutter speed would be best if you intended to turn your 720@50fps footage into slo-mo. I wasn’t 100% sure, and there was some debate in the comments about which techniques produced the best results so I thought I’d do a little test.

I shot the same exciting footage of pouring a glass of water on a 7D set to 720@50fps using 1/100, 1/200 and 1/400. I then converted it to ProRez422HQ and conformed the 1/200 and 1/400 from 50fps to 25fps in CinemaTools. I then stuck it all into FCP7 into two timelines, one 50fps and one 25fps. As there wasn’t a conform to 12.5fs option in CinemaTools to quarter the 1/400 I took the halved 1/400 footage and slowed the speed by half using FCP’s speed tool, leaving blend/scale/ripple all on.  Below are the two results exported as 720 H.264 25fps and 50fps.

50fps timeline

25fps timeline

I having looked at the clips a number of times, zoomed in on the detail, gone through them frame by frame I prefer the 1/200 slowed by CinemaTools to 25fps in the 25fps timeline. If you were going for a really slow shot I’d defiantly suggest the 1/400/CinemaTools/FCPspeed option as although a little soft, its still very much usable.

But that’s my opinion, and as with all these things its down to personal taste. So which do you prefer? Comments are just below. And if you’d like me to re-do the test in anyway just shout and I’ll see what I can do.

Picture Styles & Grading

Came across these excellent videos from Adam Stevenson on Vimeo.com. I represent them here with his permission, cheers Adam!

Here you’ll learn some useful other potential picture styles, and in the comments you can find links to picture styles you can upload to your camera using EOS Utility (Canon only, sorry!). Just plug your camera in, set it to manual camera mode and then click ‘Register User Defined Style’ then upload the files Adam offers to your User Defined 1, 2 or 3.

Adam also shows in his video use of Magic Bullet Looks, an awesome suite of grading tools from Red Giant Software.

www.MobyGratis.com

One of the most overlooked parts of post production is the audio.

Fact.

Fail to include incidental music and spot effects and your masterpiece is nothing but a shell of pretty pictures and (sometimes) shaky dialogue.

And thats where www.MobyGratis.com comes in to help. Its a free-to-register site that lets independent, non-profit film-makers and students download and use music from Moby in their projects. If you need to get a commercial licence then there’s a simple form to sort that out too.