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Any solutions for smoothing out shaky cam during an export?

Not sure if that title makes sense, but bear with me.


I'm putting together a video for a local business. One of the shots of my video was very shaky, due to high winds on the day of shooting. I added the Smoothcam filter - which took 5 hours to render... the clip is just over 3 seconds long. Once it was rendered, it looked great. No sign of shaky cam whatsoever. However, after I exported the video, that clip looked horrendous. Blurred, ghosting, crazy shaking etc.


Is there any solution to this? Are there options that I need to select before exporting that will keep the smoothness of the edit?


Thanks in advance.


David

iMac, Mac OS X (10.6.4)

Posted on Oct 10, 2015 9:04 AM

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Posted on Oct 14, 2015 12:27 PM

First off, when you apply smoothcam to a clip, it will analyze the ENTIRE CLIP, and not just the 3 second section you use in your sequence. Very bothersome, yes. Best solution to that is to export a small section, the part you want to use, bring that back in, and then apply the smooth cam to that. It'll then take seconds.


Second, how this looks depends on how much movement and shakiness there is. If there is a lot of shake, the plugin might need to push in quite a ways to smooth this out, and not show the black edge of the frame. And if there is a lot of like "earthquake" shake...as in it's not just an unsteady hand, but vibration, then there's not much that can be done, because that shake alone makes the image soft and causes ghosting. The smooth cam will push in on that and show it even more (I know, i shot a stand up in high winds and this all happened to me too).

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Question marked as Best reply

Oct 14, 2015 12:27 PM in response to Rawky

First off, when you apply smoothcam to a clip, it will analyze the ENTIRE CLIP, and not just the 3 second section you use in your sequence. Very bothersome, yes. Best solution to that is to export a small section, the part you want to use, bring that back in, and then apply the smooth cam to that. It'll then take seconds.


Second, how this looks depends on how much movement and shakiness there is. If there is a lot of shake, the plugin might need to push in quite a ways to smooth this out, and not show the black edge of the frame. And if there is a lot of like "earthquake" shake...as in it's not just an unsteady hand, but vibration, then there's not much that can be done, because that shake alone makes the image soft and causes ghosting. The smooth cam will push in on that and show it even more (I know, i shot a stand up in high winds and this all happened to me too).

Oct 14, 2015 12:29 PM in response to Shane Ross

Thanks for your response.


I did actually figure something else out. I took the clip and imported it into iMovie. I then used the stabilizer filter and exported it back into FCP. It worked like a charm... almost looked like a steadicam shot 😀


Thanks for informing me about Smooth shoot analyzing everything in the timeline. I wasn't aware of that.

Any solutions for smoothing out shaky cam during an export?

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