Annoying Smoothcam Bug in FCP 7

[Burger Thing]

Hello,

I am a bit annoyed to say the least. I just spent weeks on a project only to find out that when I export my movie, the clips with Smoothcam applied look terrible. Very jittery and in fact worse than without Smoothcam applied.

I did a quick search on the internet and found that I am apparently not the only user with this problem.

It is beyond me why this bug wasn't found during the testing in the labs. Or are all developers busy with iPhone apps?

It seems though, that a workaround to the problem is to send an unanalyzed clip to Motion and use the stabilizer there and send the clip back to FCP. Also, I found it quite annoying that there is no option to let FCP analyze only a portion of a clip for Smoothcam.

Please Apple, fix this!

 

[FSMBP]

Not to belittle your problem, but I'd figure most people would want to use Motion's tools for smooth cam/stabilization due to its superiority over FCP's.

And I feel ya, unfortunately everyone is probably preoccupied with iPhone OS, haha.

 

[TheStrudel]

FSMBP is correct.

I would point out that your other quibbles relate directly to your usage of SmoothCam. It has automatic settings, but in my usage, they weren't always good settings.

You need to understand what they are and how to apply them, otherwise your footage looks like crud, because part of what it does is enlarge and nudge the footage - scaling up usually has a resultant quality loss.

Also, portion of a clip? It's kind of embarrassing to point this out, but why did you not just use the razor tool to split the clip into pieces and only use the filter on the clips you intend to smooth? Problem solved.

It's not bugs. You just don't understand how to use it. Yes, it could be easier to use, but Motion is superior for this kind of work, and they expect you to know how to find your way around a filter in FCP.

Before you ask  to fix anything, you should first endeavor to understand whether or not it is broken and if so, how.

 

[Burger Thing]

Yes, I am exporting my clips now to Motion. I tried to use Motion as little as possible though, because at the moment I am running it on a system with only 4GB and so far Motion crashed about 4 - 5 times an hour...

I really hope that Apple will have mercy and maybe let the one or the other software engineer spend a few minutes a day for the ProApps

 

[TheStrudel]

They expect you to run them on a machine with more than 4GB of RAM. Especially Motion since that's actually 64-bit.

I, too, would like a lot more attention paid to ProApps, but they're just not where the money is, so we get less attention. It's a much smaller market.

 

[Burger Thing]

FSMBP is correct.

I would point out that your other quibbles relate directly to your usage of SmoothCam. It has automatic settings, but in my usage, they weren't always good settings.

You need to understand what they are and how to apply them, otherwise your footage looks like crud, because part of what it does is enlarge and nudge the footage - scaling up usually has a resultant quality loss.

Also, portion of a clip? It's kind of embarrassing to point this out, but why did you not just use the razor tool to split the clip into pieces and only use the filter on the clips you intend to smooth? Problem solved.

It's not bugs. You just don't understand how to use it. Yes, it could be easier to use, but Motion is superior for this kind of work, and they expect you to know how to find your way around a filter in FCP.

Before you ask  to fix anything, you should first endeavor to understand whether or not it is broken and if so, how.

Thanks for the reply. The problem is, that when I look at my rendered Clips in the Timeline, they look great after SmoothCam is applied. The problem is, that when I export the movie, the result is terrible jittery.

It almost seems like, that SmoothCam exported clips have a motion correction into the opposite way compared to the correction in the rendered clips in the timeline.

I just typed this into Google:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=safari&rls=en&ei=b0HFSvnaLo_y6gPIqp2nDQ&sa=X&oi=spell&resnum=0&ct=result&cd=1&q=smoothcam+problem+when+exporting&spell=1

 

[Burger Thing]

They expect you to run them on a machine with more than 4GB of RAM. Especially Motion since that's actually 64-bit.

I, too, would like a lot more attention paid to ProApps, but they're just not where the money is, so we get less attention. It's a much smaller market.

Yes, you are right of course. I really need to upgrade my RAMs soon. Thanks for the reply. I was really kind of pixxed just now after I watched my exported clips.