Stabilize compound clip

[Jeremy Garchow]

Export that sequence as a movie, reimport that movie and stabilize.

You can’t stabilize a compound, correct.

[Craig Seeman]

Why image sequence support would be important.
Make sure to use the FCPX feedback form.

[Bret Williams]

What if you pasted the stills into a clip via the open in timeline command? Might treat it as a clip then.

[Mark Smith]

Hmm. I could try that. I have a heap of go pro stills from a time lapse sequence that need some work…

[Jeremy Garchow]

GoPro Studio can make movies fro you, from the image sequence, and Compressor can also open an image sequence and make a movie for you.

[Kripá Pizzorno]

I was just trying to stabilize a compound clip today, and ended up doing what Jeremy suggests: exported a master file, re-imported, and was then able to add stabilization. Not a bad work-around.

[Mark Smith]

I will give both of those apps a look today. I have made shorter time lapses inside FCPX rather quickly but this particular one with a large amount of go pro stills has been vexing FCPX AND needs some stabilization, so my noraml T-L wokflow is breaking down at this point.
Thanks for the tips.

[Mark Smith]

I just used both compressor and GP studio to crank out some image sequences from go pro and digital SLR sources.

That was so easy . Good tips Jeremy

[Joe Marler]

The difficulty of stabilizing a compound or multicam clip or retiming it with optical flow is a long-standing deficiency of FCP X. Considering how well FCP X otherwise does multicam, it is a glaring issue.

A workaround (developed by others) which works for both multicam and compound clips:

1. On your timeline, select clip then Shift+F to locate the clip in the event browser – this will highlight your clip
2. Cmd+1 – go to event browser window, use skimmer to check starting/ending time codes of highlighted clip & write them down. If needed first do View>Show Skimmer Info to display timecode above skimmer. Zoom browser in/out if needed to see clearly the start/end points of the highlighted clip.
3. Double click the multicam clip in the event browser to open it in Angle Editor.
4. Once in Angle Editor, press Control+P to type in the remembered time codes. Don’t enter colons, just the numbers, e.g: for 12:52:19 just enter 125219, then Enter.
5. Blade that section of the clip, then apply stabilization or retime with optical flow.
6. Press the “go back” timeline history arrow (upper left of timeline) to return to multicam/composite clip

Complex as the above procedure seems, once you’ve done it numerous times it becomes pretty fast. However it is a sad situation to be forced through such gymnastics on an editor which emphasizes ease of use.