Jitter in smoothcam compression

[Michael Gissing]

Welcome Dave,

Try making a QT file of the smoothcam shot and put that in the sequence on the track above the original.

Curious if you are using Quicktime conversion or Compressor to make the mpeg/ DVCPro50. I have seen this reported here before and I can’t remember if it was due to quicktime conversion or not. A search of this forum should show others experiences and solutions to this. Also take time to read the FAQ as many common issues are covered.

Also it is a good idea to report your setup, FCP version, sequence settings, codecs and frame rates when asking for advice.

[Dave Wilkinson]

Thanks for your response, Mike. Much better than Apple Forum!

The QT file, though made at current settings, was far lower in image quality than the original clip, but when re-exported after smoothcam the judder did disappear. Now I must chose which is worse, the original shake or the lower image quality in the smoothcam/QT clip.

I am an Emmy-nominated Director of a weekly show on Maine Public TV show trying to get my first feature ready for Sundance. We don’t have much time.

Any way to keep the original HD quality with QT export? It looks perfect in FCP! But the new clip no longer refers to the downloaded HD footage. Can any QT file match it?

This is a key issue. I am considering “baking” some multi-layered sequences to reduce compression time, now 30+ hours for this 1-hour feature. But not if this much quality is lost. Any way to make QT export clips the same quality as the originals?

Thanks for all your help.

Dave