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Smoothcam like in Shake?
Is there a way to achieve a smoothcam-like filter using the tracker in AE? I downloaded the Shake trial version and am thinking of purchasing Shake mainly because of this feature (and integration w/FCS). But, I’d like to save the 5bills if I can already achieve this with AE.
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5 Replies
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I’m not familiar with Shake, but a simple technique for smoothing out camera jitters in AE is to use a motion tracker on your source footage and apply this tracker to a Null object’s anchor point then parent your source footage to the Null object. Your mileage may vary depending on the magnitude of the jitters and the quality of the motion track.
You also will need to scale up the source a little bit to make sure that you can’t see the edges of the footage when it’s being compensated.
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The smoothcam I used in Shake was on a VERY jittery piece of DV footage. It was following a subject through a zoom then a pan. I applied the smoothcam filter, set the range and scaled up the image to account for the smoothcam and the results were amazing. I haven’t been able to do this with AE other than in a static shot. I was wondering if anyone has a way to do this effectively through a zoom & pan?
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So it sounds like you’re not trying to stabilize the footage entirely, only smooth the camera movement, which I should’ve gathered from the title of your post to begin with =)
This can be accomplished with a Camera in After Effects if you motion track your source, apply the tracking data to the anchor point of the footage then duplicate the layer (I’d recommend renaming it something like “Smoother”), apply a smooth() expression to the anchor point on the “Smoother” layer, turn its visibility off and parent the Camera to it (make sure they are all 3D layers).
Without the smooth() expression the above process would result in a comp that looks exactly like your original footage (as the camera would be following the footage in lock step) but the smooth() expression on the parent layer causes the movement of that layer (and thus the camera) to be smoothed as it follows the source footage along its path.
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Thanks for the recipe. I gave it a try and with a lot of tweaking I got some pretty good results. I think I’m going to go ahead and get Shake though. I need to do this to a ton of shots (reality show) and to be able to send out the individual shots from the timeline in Final Cut and fix them with very little effort will more than pay for Shake. Plus, having another tool in my arsenal is always a good thing.
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If you need something to smooth out shots iStabilize is an awsome app, only for mac though, but its incredibly fast and easy to use and gets amazing results. I never even knew there was such an application.
I used this on my short film for crane shots, dolly shots, steadicam shots, it works with
any kind of footage. I believe it works the same as shake as it tracks points in the whole scene and then offsets to get a steady result. Its great because it works with a moving camera. This saved me on my short and even some VFX work. It would of been such a pain to track the shots I did without this. It was about $50 when I bought it.
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