duplicate a shake using SmoothCam?

I like the camera shake in a shot and wish to duplicate it in a second, shakeless shot. I don't expect to duplicate the blurs; the movements will be enough. In old times I'd do it frame-by-frame. Never again. FCP includes SmoothCam. When SmoothCam removes the shake from the first shot, it probably builds a frame-by-frame list of the small movements that cancel the shake. Is there a way to apply those corrections to the second shot? Can I trick SmoothCam into thinking the second shot is the first shot after SmoothCam has analyzed the first shot? Then SmoothCam would give the second shot a camera shake exactly opposite the first shot's shake. That should do, or else I can rotate the first shot 180 degrees before SmoothCam analyzes it.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

You can't do it with SmoothCam. You could try doing it in AE. First stabilize the shot, then copy and paste the keyframes onto the next shot. You can render in motion blur if you want to.



www.strypesinpost.com

Experiment with the motion blur, though. Depending on the shot, you might get a very objectionable results. Due to the lack of parallax, objects in the distance will move the same amount as objects close to camera, and the "dumb" motion blur that After Effects generates will be all wrong. Do some tests before deciding whether it's more objectionable not to have any blur, or to have the wrong blur.

strypes Wrote:
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> You can't do it with SmoothCam.

Can't!? How can you be sure SmoothCam can't be tricked into thinking the second shot is the first shot after SmoothCam has analyzed the first shot?

I find a .mtdf binary file made by SmoothCam from its analysis of the shaky footage. The filesize is 24 KB for the 210 frame shot, so it can't contain much more than the motion tracking information. I'll let SmoothCam analyze the static shot and try patching some of the first .mtdf file into the second .mtdf file.

A hacker's mentality is needed to not become enslaved to FCP's options. I'd really like to understand how FCP identifies imported clips. Suppose you import ShotA, put it into a sequence, edit it, etc. How can you then substitute ShotB for ShotA? It's not enough to rename ShotB (in capture scratch) 'ShotA'. It's not enough for ShotB to have the same number of frames and pixels as ShotA. (VBR ProRes makes it unlikely they have the same filesize.) What does FCP require for the substitution? Knowing this would let us do it with SmoothCam as well as many other tasks.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Quote

A hacker's mentality is needed to not become enslaved to FCP's options.

Which is fine. But an editor's mentality is "I could've been done by now if I'd just used the proper tool for this."

Curiosity is great. But when you're working under a deadline, curiosity isn't a solution; it's a problem to be overcome.

IT WORKED!

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Jeff Harrell Wrote:
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>... an editor's mentality is "I could've been done
> by now if I'd just used the proper tool for this."

It turns out that FCP SmoothCam is a good tool for this. The job took 10 minutes. The "proper" tool?" That's relative to common practice. Isn't a purpose of this forum to improve common practice? Let's explore the full range of FCP's capabilities so FCP editors do not have to acquire many other softwares.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

I think one of the core purposes of this forum is to share good advice. Hacking around a program function to get it to do something that was not intended is not what I'd call good advice.

Big deal. It doesn't take that long to do it in AE. And coming to think of it, Motion too. There's a feature called match move.



www.strypesinpost.com

One must be in deep thrall of FCP to believe its authors had clear intentions for what the program does. It's a cobbled mess of incomplete and overlapping functions. Experts like Hodgetts' think it needs to be reconceived.

This isn't a forum of FCP worshippers but FCP owners-users. We've invested time and money in FCP and we want to get the most out of it. Thinking SmoothCam, made to smooth camera motions, can't also roughen them is like thinking a screwdriver can't remove screws.

It was hardly a hack. The two .mtdf files appeared on my desktop. They had identical size. The one for the shaky shot was hairy while the one for the static shot had lots of zeros. I pasted the first 72 bytes of the static shot file onto the shaky shot file and renamed it as the static shot file. But I noticed just one byte that was different, so maybe I could have skipped the pasting and just renamed. The newly shaky shot, which is actually an end title, looks beautiful, and I thank FCP for leaving some of its iron showing and for not being perfectly intended.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

strypes Wrote:
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> Big deal. It doesn't take that long to do it in
> AE. And coming to think of it, Motion too. There's
> a feature called match move.

AE is outside the scope of this forum.
As for Motion's "match move" feature, is a random shake a move? Can Motion identify the shake just as SmoothCam does? Perhaps Motion can do what SmoothCam does. Big deal.
When you answered bluntly "You can't do it with SmoothCam" I thought you knew something about SmoothCam's or FCP's deep workings to support that. Obviously SmoothCam collects movement information in its clip analysis and that information is saved (somewhere) so the SmoothCam filter parameters can later be set. If you knew the information was inaccessible or intimately bound with the image information, then your answer would be reasonable. So I was disappointed, while also pleasantly surprised, to notice the .mtdf file right on my desktop.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

Smoothcam is integrated into Motion and Motion is an environment created for what you are trying to do. Many users on this forum use AE as well as FCP, and what you are trying to do isnt rocket science.



www.strypesinpost.com

Can I make just a couple little suggestions?

First of all, tossing around terms like "deep thrall" and "worshippers" isn't, in my experience, a very good way to get help or make friends. Being dismissive and derogatory of your professional peers might not be the best choice.

Second, don't stress so much about what's in and out of scope for the forum. The moderators are responsible for managing that, more or less by consensus, and as a group they've expressed a tendency to have a pretty liberal interpretation. If a moderator suggests that you might accomplish something by using a tool other than Final Cut Pro, the odds are fair-to-middling that he or she did so because he or she has been down that road before and has come back from the trip bearing experience and maybe a bit of wisdom. Put simply, good advice is never off-topic.

It's great that you made Smoothcam work for you this time. Your use case was not, however, what Smoothcam is built for. I'm sure you understand very well that "Just paste the first 72 bytes" is not an acceptable workflow in a professional, deadline-based environment.

Indeed, my effect was very simple so I hoped to do it within FCP. I've never installed Motion, assuming it is specialized to animated, geometrical motions, heavy on "optical flow", which I don't need. "Just drag and drop to send particles exploding through space. Swing cameras around an object with breathtaking ease." Is that rocket science?

SmoothCam, as I understand it, has an easier job than full-fledged optical flow. SmoothCam has only to find a couple of trackable points and then apply movements of the whole frame which either hold those points fixed or make them travel simple smooth curves. That is, SmoothCam, as I understand it, introduces no fakeness of its own within the frame, but by maintaining the original blurs it does make a wrong-looking stabilized image. Full-fledged optical flow would attempt to make the blurs right.

FCP and Motion can share SmoothCam, but it makes sense that they are separate applications.

Dennis Couzin
Berlin, Germany

>I've never installed Motion, assuming it is specialized to animated, geometrical
>motions, heavy on "optical flow", which I don't need.

Why don't you install Motion and spend a good afternoon figuring what it is about? Frankly, I don't understand editors trying hard to push an application down the roads it was not designed to travel. FCP is an offline editor, and as a storytelling tool, it is darn good for what it does. For titling, match moving, vfx and audio mixing there are other tools much more suited for the job. And you are more able to fine tune the effects you are trying to create.



www.strypesinpost.com

what you want' to achieve is a breeze with Motion.