Blending clip between SmoothCam and non-SmoothCam states

[Daniel Arts]

I would keep with the splitting the clip idea and match the scale and position of the first frame of the smoothed clip with the last frame of the unsmoothed clip.

Hope this works for you, but you are right, bringing it into After Effects or Shake would allow for more control.

Daniel

[Michael Sacci]

if you take the first half that is spilt and enlarge it to the amount applied to the first frame of the smoothed clip it may give you a smooth transition.

[Todd Reid]

What happens when you smoothcam the whole thing?
I assume it does something you don’t like. I will also guess that it is similar to matching the scale to the second half.

Here is a suggestion….
When you go to match your first half of clip, keyframe the scale so that it begins at regular fullscreen, then moves smoothly to its ending point (which would be your match to the second half).
Hopefully the clip is long enough so that it doesn’t look like a camera move. A linear move (not ease in/ease out) may look smoother.

[Ryan Mast]

Any other options, like using a flashframe or cutting away to something else? Cheap cover, but it works.

Here’s what I do:
Slide auto-scale down to 0. How much was it scaling initially? If it’s less than 105%, don’t worry about it. The smoothcammed clip will USUALLY drift back into the center of the screen by the end of the edit, so you can cleanly cut to the unsmoothcammed clip. However, if you need to cover black edges by scaling, still leave auto-scale off, but zoom in with the scale slider in the motion tab in your first clip. Then punch that same number into your second clip, and you can keyframe a scale out to 100% in your second clip, if you’d like. It depends on your footage — in my experience, scaling using motion instead of the auto-scale in SmoothCam usually matches two clips of the same shot a little better. Maybe add a soft wipe if you need to cover a little drift. Soft wipe or some other gradient-based transition is a little better than a cross dissolve in this case usually, if both clips are a pixel or two off — if you cross portions of the image at a time instead of all at once, the eye doesn’t notice it as readily, make sense? You already saw what cross-dissolving the whole image at once looks like.

YMMV. It depends on the footage and how SmoothCam is acting. Good luck.

In other news, turning auto-scale off and turning Translation, Rotation, and Scale all the way up on really bad footage can produce some interesting effects. I put this together for fun, just to see how much I could abuse it…