Looking for two “anti-zoom/pan” filters for FCP….

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

I’ve been editing all kinds of footage for decades.
And have never needed a filter to keep track of swish-pans and bad zooms.

I’m curious as to why you have so many of these that you need a way to automatically eliminate them.

[Martin Mayer]

Well, our footage (weddings!) is full of them – we keep two cameras running all the time during the service, speeches, etc, etc. Then it is easy to sync up just two long clips in post, but the footage zips between difference viewpoints all the time, and (at present) we cut out all the crashes/zips on the timeline by hand.

[Bouncing Account needs new email address]

[mooblie] “and (at present) we cut out all the crashes/zips on the timeline by hand.”

Even if you found software to “recognize” these kind of shots, you’d STILL have to “fix” nearly every one of them by hand because the software could never be accurate enough to “slice” them correctly.
Not to mention the “borderline” versions of these shots that you may choose to leave IN.

[Walter Biscardi]

[mooblie] “It occurs to me that it should be possible to produce a filter that marked (or otherwise indicated) sections of clips that included:

(a) crash zooms, or
(b) zip pans

(…so they can be deleted!)”

That’s what Editors and Edit Assists are for.

Walter Biscardi, Jr.
https://www.biscardicreative.com

Now editing “Good Eats” in HD for the Food Network

“I reject your reality and substitute my own!” – Adam Savage, Mythbusters

[Tom Matthies]

Maybe we should just try to “invent” camera persons that know how to shoot an event like it was live and thus eleminate the swish-pan problem at the source…
Just a thought.
Tom

[Martin Mayer]

We shoot deliberately like this, to maximise usable footage through minimising time lost when zooming/panning (which never makes the final cut).

I resent the insinuation that we don’t know what we’re doing in either shooring or editing: it’s a deliberate shooting style for the reasons outlined previously. I had hoped for something a little more constructively critical, rather than faintly veiled abuse, but, hey, life’s too short to get uptight.

Thakns anyway! Martin.

[Andy Mees]

Martin

it was a poorly thought through idea that betrays a certain level of inexperience … hence the less than constructive replies.

regarding the practical implementation of such a filter … have you ever seen an FCP filter that actually cuts your footage, or flags it in any way other than by triggering a ‘render bar’? i haven’t, but that doesn’t mean that such filters don’t exist.

end of the day, you’ve got to look through your footage anyway … might as well just mark it up by hand

cheers
Andy

[Martin Mayer]

Well, there are filters that attempt to mark clips at scene changes (like DV Stop/Start detect does by reference to discontinuities in the real time/date metadata), only those filters work on footage without such metadata – and, it must be said, are fairly hit and miss.

These work on the statistical measurements of the number and degree of changes between successive frames’ pixels, and it occurs to me the same approach could have been taken with zip pans and crash zooms.

[Shane Ross]

Sorry, but when someone comes along asking for a filter or plugin that automatically does the work for you, that tends to illicit a certain response from professionals editors. Filters that “automatically” add markers or cuts on the beat of the music that is added, filters that “automatically” cut out all the bad parts…and breaks the footage up into only the clips you want. And now your request.

There are no such filters. This is what is called editing, and editing is looking at your footage to find what you want and don’t want, and assembling it into a coherent, and one would hope artisitic, manner.

[Martin Mayer]

OK, a valid point, and I understand your reaction. But how is this different from, say, an audio limiter that reduces the gain gently on an audio track wherever is too high? Or applying a colour-corrector (sorry, I’m British!) color-corrector that squashes or streches your blacks – you wouldn’t conceive of doing this manually at the pixel level.

You are only using the computer to do some of the work it CAN: the “less intelligent” work, leaving the professional editors to do the higher level (artistic) work. Is that wrong? Does that betray a lack of professionalism, wanting the computer to do as much of the “automatic” work as it can? Otherwise we’d all still be Luddites, cutting lengths of film?