Multimedia
Blogs
Forum
Affordable HD
Whitepapers
Newsletters
Events
Advertisers
Blogcast
MillimeterStabilizing Your Video Footage, Part 1
Jul 6, 2010 12:00 PM, By Jan Ozer
Figure 3. Final Cut Pro's easy-to-use SmoothCam feature.
Apple SmoothCam
For the record, SmoothCam is a Final Cut Pro filter that you can find and apply in the Video Filters > Video subfolder in Final Cut Pro's Effects browser. Coming into this review, my recollection was that SmoothCam required roughly forever to analyze a clip, though in head-to-head comparisons, performance really wasn't really that bad. I did take a peek at Activity Monitor during the analysis phase, however, and found room for improvement, with only about 20 percent of the available CPU power used. Note that you can continue editing while Final Cut Pro performs the SmoothCam analysis, as you can with the Magic Bullet Steady effect, but you can't do so with Boris' or CHV-Electronics' offerings.
| Related Links | ||
|
Of course, the biggest knock against SmoothCam is that Final Cut Pro analyzes the entire clip to apply the effect, not just the portion on the timeline. So if you needed to smooth 20 seconds from a 60-minute clip, Final Cut Pro would analyze the entire 60 minutes—unless, of course, you did what any sane person would do and exported a QuickTime Reference Movie containing just the critical 20 seconds. Note that creating a subclip won't do; you have to create a separate file.
As discussed above, SmoothCam was excellent when smoothing motion, but not the best at stabilization functions. From a usability standpoint, SmoothCam is the easiest function around; just apply the filter, let Final Cut Pro analyze, and render the timeline to preview your results. The default configuration worked well in both smoothness-related tests, and messing with the controls didn't improve the results in the stabilization test. As mentioned, SmoothCam automatically zooms into the clip to hide any frame edges, which is the best approach.
Finally, SmoothCam proved stable in all of my tests.
Now let's turn our attention to Motion.
Figure 4. Motion's Stabilize behavior.
Stabilize behavior in Apple Motion
Though you can import your clip directly into Motion and apply the behavior there, the workflow I used was to deploy the clip in Final Cut Pro, then right-click the clip in the timeline and choose Send To > Motion Project. Name the new project, and Final Cut Pro substitutes the Motion project for the clip in the timeline. Motion's image stabilization function is a behavior that you apply by choosing Behavior > Motion Tracking > Stabilize.
Motion's configuration options are straightforward. First you choose the Quality (Better or Faster), then the Method (Stabilize or Smooth). You can elect to Zoom away any borders, which you'll likely want to do in most cases, or select Normal to view the edges. You can choose which dimension to apply the corrective adjustments to (Horizon, Vertical or both), and whether to adjust for position, scale, and/or rotation. When stabilizing a clip, you can add the tracker shown, which typically won't improve your results, but may cut analysis time, since Motion only analyzes the selected region, not the entire frame.
Figure 5. Applying the Stabilize behavior in Motion.
Once you've set your configuration options, click Analyze, and Motion analyzes your clip. You can preview and make any adjustments in Motion, then save your project, which updates it in the Final Cut Pro timeline. If you want to make any further changes to the clip, right-click and choose Open in Editor, which opens the project back in Motion.
The biggest knock against Motion is performance, which was the slowest by far. A glance at Activity Monitor during the analyz revealed why; my eight-core workstation was 93 percent idle during the long analysis phase—hopefully an inefficiency that Apple can address in the next update.
In terms of quality, Motion produced excellent results for both stabilization and smoothing, though SmoothCam's faster rendering times make it the tool of choice for smoothing. As with SmoothCam, Motion ran through our tests without a hiccup, so stability was also excellent.
Between the two Apple stabilization functions, you can create excellent quality for both smoothing and stabilization. The primary reason to look elsewhere relates to performance. That's it for this time. Next time, we take a look at the three third-party tools.
Continue the discussion on “Crosstalk” the Millimeter Forum.