Smoothing out a pan – possible?

[Bill Davis]

Theoretically. Some. Maybe.

In X you invoke the “analyze footage for camera shake” during import or after your clip is imported. and it can sometimes help.

But like all “fix it in post” solutions, it sometimes makes thing better and sometimes really doesn’t.

The process essentially works by “blowing up” the shakey frames to larger than the original size, sacrificing some resolution in favor of creating a “margin” around the frame that can be panned and scanned around to compensate for radical changes in what should be constant motion.

If the “shakes” are minor, it can look pretty good. If things “jolt” or the inconstancies are too great, the results can be as bad or worse than no correction at all.

Costs nothing but some extra background rendering time to try it. So knock yourself out.

Good luck.

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[Jon Smitherton]

Try After Effects’ new warp stabilizer in CS5.5 – have been doing exactly that, this week – works great!

Jon

[John Irvine]

Thanks guys, unfortunately I don’t have After Effects, but I’ll bear it in mind. I’ll try the stabilising option in FCPX – thanks.

[John Irvine]

Well, I was skeptical Bill, but I gave stabilising a go, and…it works on my shaky panning! I really didn’t think it would be able to deal with that kind of variation in lateral movement – brilliant! Yes, I do lose a bit of the frame, but it’s worth it. Thanks again, John 🙂

[Bill Davis]

[John Irvine] “Well, I was skeptical Bill, but I gave stabilising a go, and…it works on my shaky panning! I really didn’t think it would be able to deal with that kind of variation in lateral movement – brilliant! Yes, I do lose a bit of the frame, but it’s worth it. Thanks again, John :)”

Glad that it helped.

Digital video tools are definitely getting better all the time!

“Before speaking out ask yourself whether your words are true, whether they are respectful and whether they are needed in our civil discussions.”-Justice O’Connor

[John Irvine]

Yes indeed, but now, just as everything is coming together, my software has completely crashed! This may lead me to a new post, but I am going to have to reinstall the application from scratch. I have backups of my work, so I feel I’ll be able to get back to where I was before the crash (FCPX crashes out after loading, even when I load with a different project, so it seems the app has become corrupted, ho hum…)

[Mitch Ives]

If you don’t find something that works like you want it to, try Lock N Load. I find it still works better than the built-in tools in FCPX…

Mitch Ives
Insight Productions Corp.
mitch@insightproductions.com
http://www.insightproductions.com

“Criticism may not be agreeable, but it is necessary. It fulfills the same function as pain in the human body. It calls attention to an unhealthy state of things.” – Winston Churchill