smooth out a juddery pans in FCPX

[Noah Kadner]

Did you already try Inspector>Video>Stabilization?

Noah

FCPWORKS – FCPX Workflow
Call Box Training

[Bill Davis]

What Noah said. Plus look for the “tripod” option inside the stabilization area. It’s specifically coded to handle movement on just the horizontal axis.

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[Ben Lithman]

Just to clarify, it’s not that the cameraman was being un smooth when filming. It seems to be more todo with a cheap camera, recording in progressive, just looks Juddery/staggery.

[Oliver Peters]

This is perfectly normal for any 24p and 25p – and even some 30p – material. Make sure you are editing in a 25p timeline and that you are monitoring in 25p or 50i. The effect will be more or less obtrusive, depending on the speed of the horizontal motion and/or the quality of the motion blur induced by the shutter angle of the camera. Cheap cameras tend to have fixed shutter angles that yield crisp images in motion, which makes judder look even worse.

– Oliver

Oliver Peters Post Production Services, LLC
Orlando, FL
http://www.oliverpeters.com

[John Fishback]

Another factor is any 24/25fps pan that is too fast will judder. The American Cinematographer Manual has a chart for a 90 degree pan relating lens focal length, fps and panning speed. For instance, 24fps, 50mm should take 23 seconds for a 90 degree pan.

[Brett Sherman]

Yep.

I don’t think it has anything to do with the camera. With pans at 24/25/30 P you either have to be really fast (think whip pans) or slow no matter how good the camera. The in-between speeds simply don’t work. You could play around with speeding up or slowing down the pan with optical flow.

[Bret Williams]

And there’s a button for rolling shutter that works wonders. Right under stabilization. Sounds like it could be the issue.

[Fabrizio D’agnano]

In the past, I experienced some similar problem that I found was field priority related. You write you shot in progressive mode, but I happened to have footage that was misinterpreted in FCP. Maybe it’s not, but it could be worth a try.

Fabrizio D’Agnano
Rome, Italy
early 2008 MacPro, BM Intensity Pro, early 2008 iMac, 2014 MacBook Pro Retina, Blackmagic UltraStudio Mini Monitor, FCP7, FCPX, OSX 10.9.4

[Ben Lithman]

I can’t say either the stabilisation or rolling shutter settings are making much difference. The “tripod mode” option is also greyed out…
Have rendered, of course.

[Joe Marler]

[Ben Lithman] “I have some footage that was shot on a relatively cheap camera @ HDV 1080p 25. Any shot that was taken while on a tripod and involves slowly panning let or right has a horrible judder to it.

Does anyone know of any filters or techniques that can smooth this out a little…?”

You can try FCP X built-in optical flow smoothing. This requires slightly retiming the clip (which could be just 99% or 101%). Select clip then pick menu Modify->Retime->Custom Speed, and pick 99% or 101%. Then Modify->Retime->Video Quality->Optical Flow. See if that helps any.