Canon 5D Footage problems in Motion Tracking

[Michael Szalapski]

H.264 is your problem.
From the wonderful Dave LaRonde:

Dave’s Stock Answer #1:

If the footage you imported into AE is any kind of the following — Native HDV, MPEG1, MPEG2, mp4, m2t, H.261 or H.264 — you need to convert it to a different codec.

These kinds of footage use temporal, or interframe compression. They have keyframes at regular intervals, containing complete frame information. However, the frames in between do NOT have complete information. Interframe codecs toss out duplicated information.

In order to maintain peak rendering efficiency, AE needs complete information for each and every frame. But because these kinds of footage contain only partial information, AE freaks out, resulting in a wide variety of problems.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

– The Great Szalam
(The ‘Great’ stands for ‘Not So Great, in fact, Extremely Humble’)

No trees were harmed in the creation of this message, but several thousand electrons were mildly inconvenienced.

[Curious Turtle]

Without a screenshot to properly look at this, you could be seeing a number of things. Here’s a couple of ideas:

i) Motion blur. Depending how you shot your footage, the shutter speed can give you some nasty motion blur. This is baked into the image and can’t be removed. So when you stabilise the footage you’re still seeing smearing. This, of course, looks rather odd.

ii) Rolling shutter. A bug bear of recording video with a CMOS sensor instead of a CCD. Fast pans give you a lovely “jelly roll” effect.

iii) It might just be a bad stabilize you’ve done :o) You’ve got CS4, so have you tried with Mocha?

You’re on a Mac, so this may not be too helpful, but there’s a little Windows app, VirtualDub with a filter called Deshaker that will help on three fronts:

It’ll remove some shake, it will do a miracle on the rolling shutter and it will get you out of H264! You’ll want to transcode your source media before you start working on it. Taking it out to ProRes makes working with FCP and the rest so much easier.

Hope that helps,
Ben

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