Produxion

I’ve had the chance to play with a new filter in FCP called SmoothCam. It’s great, and creates delicious results.

It’s basically a camera stabilisation filter which has been ported from Shake. It processes your footage to create a vector map of all of the objects and movements, then using that data to manipulate the original footage to create smooth camera motion.

The processing of your footage can take some time, but it’s a one-off task, and once it’s done, you can make changes to the filter settings without the need to re-process. You can make adjustments to the amount of each transformation the filter applies. One of the other things it does is to automatically zoom the image to mask any black areas which appear, due to the compensation of the transformations – and you can also set the level at which this is applied.

I’ve been working with some footage which was shot in a hurry, with a Z7 mounted on a tripod strapped around my neck and braced with both arms. A lot of it was fast-paced and there were a few bumps, which is why I wanted to run SmoothCam through its paces, to see whether I could get an authentic syeadycam look with my shoddy, rushed footage. I shot in HDV, but the end result is going onto a SD DVD, so I had plenty of flexibility in how much I could zoom the image, which in turn, allowed me to ratchet up the SmoothCam settings quite high.

And it looks fantastic! It’s not perfect, but it goes a long way to tidying up the material. And with filmic grading, and 1.35 letterboxing, it looks quite authentic.

It’s certainly not a cure-all, and is best suited to tracking shots, or slow pans. It can have trouble with irregular movement, or fast pans, at which point you have to chop your footage and carefully splice filtered and unfiltered clips together – it can be time-consuming, but then you can’t have everything for free.

I just wish I could show off the final footage, but sadly it’s a private commission which can’t be broadcast publicly.

Stick “SmoothCam” into Google though, and you’ll get a heap of articles on the subject – some with examples of test footage.