A tripod is often … very often … a good thing when shooting video. I don’t have one to complement the HV20 and it is on the get list. A steady camera is a happy camera and you won’t make your audience sea-sick as the camera bobs and weaves. But sometimes you just can’t shoot with one. What do you do when a shot that you need for your edit is too shaky? You can always try to stabilize the shot with software like Magic Bullet Steady. Steady is available as a stand-alone purchase or as part of the Magic Bullet Suite 2008. The important thing to remember with any software designed to stabilize a shot is that it isn’t always a life-saver and can’t save every shot. But on some it can work wonders.
The best way to see what it can do is look at it in action. First is a shot that I was trying to hold as still as possible with my fake Fig Rig. It’s not too bad but could use some smoothing out. It’s a 5 second piece of a 9.5 second total shot at 1440×1080 ProRes resolution (it was converted from HDV). Magic Bullet Steady took 5 seconds to analyze the shot and about 10.5 seconds to render. Apple’s built-in Smoothcam took 1 minute 5 seconds to analyize the shot and 14 seconds to render. This was on a Mac Pro Quad-core 3 ghz. Here is the result, with the MB Steady option toggled through its 3 different motion parameters:
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Magic Bullet Steady test from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.
Now, Final Cut Pro has the built-in SmoothCam and you might wonder why you would need Magic Bullet Steady when you already have SmoothCam. From the clip above you can see that SmoothCam does a great job. While SmoothCam is a very good tool it has become legendary for analyzingly long analysis times. This is often due to (IMHO) a fatal flaw in SmoothCam where it has to analyze the entire master clip of the shot it has been applied to. If you use 3 seconds of a 20 minute shot it will analyze all 20 minutes. If you are on a PowerPC machine then get ready for a long, long, long, long, long wait. Did I say it’s a long wait? The above clip was only a 9.5 second master shot but if you capture whole tapes at once you can see where this could be a problem. Of course a workaround is to render a QuickTime of that 3 second shot and cut it back into your edit. That works to shorten the analysis time dramatically but if you have more than a few shots this can be quite time consuming. Magic Bullet Steady only has to analyze what is used in the timeline.
Steady-ing software works best on things with moderate movement and shake but you can throw it on a handheld tracking shot or a pan as well. It’s success depends on the motion and how much time you are willing to fiddle with the settings. You often have to be willing to accept some strange bending, flexing and jitter of the final shot for something with a lot of movement as you can see from the handheld tracking shot below. For best results spend time tweaking the settings. SmoothCam seems to produce a better result on tracking types of shots.
Magic Bullet Steady handheld tracking test from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.
Another example is below of a pan:
Magic Bullet Steady pan from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.
Magic Bullet Steady produced great results with this shot where SmoothCam caused some strobing in the movement of the car and had to really zoom in on the shot quite a bit. Again, you often have to adjust the settings for the best results but it’s also nice to get good results from the default settings when you are in a hurry.
Magic Bullet Steady has quite a few more setting options than SmoothCam including the ability to set a manual detection region and a scene change detection function if you apply Steady to a completed edit like a self-contained QuickTime:
A quirk I did notice is that the product is called Magic Bullet Steady but it listed under the FCP effect menu as Stabilize. Overall Steady’s biggest advanatge is speed. It doesn’t have to analyize the entire unused media, only what’s in the timeline which can be the difference between using it and not using SmoothCam. It also renders faster than SmoothCam. After a shot is analyzed it then has to be rendered, both with Steady and SmoothCam. But SmoothCam seems to do a better job on tracking shots or shots with extreme movement. But if your shot has extreme shake and movement in them do they really need to be in the edit anyway? Truth be told it’s often been a trial and error process applying both to certain shots that I had to smooth out and deciding which one looked best. Since SmoothCam is included in a Final Cut Studio 2 install and Magic Bullet Steady is available as a demo you can try for yourself before buying. While Magic Bullet Steady is available as a stand-alone product the best deal is to pick up the entire Magic Bullet 2008 suite since it’s included as part of that install. Then you have Steady and a lot more tools at your disposal.
