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Filed under: Post Production •

The History of SmoothCam

As they say, it’s not the destination that’s important, it’s the journey, and that can be said about a lot of things.  We as editors take things for granted, without appreciating where it came from.  As a Shake user, I loved SmoothCam, and when I found out they were brining it to Final Cut Studio 2, I was really excited.  I decided, for this article, to look at SmoothCam, where it came from, and how it evolved from Shake.

As I say in the video, SmoothCam is a very welcome addition to Final Cut Pro 6, and I think it really shows the future of Final Cut Pro effects work, and with Background Processing, the future looks very bright indeed!

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Another “gotchya” with SmoothCam is the fact that any sudden change in exposure in the clip, such as a camera flash or a sun flare, will completely discombobulate the analysis and cause the frame to jump. iStabilize will process these sorts of clips without any problems.

Posted by chucksav  on  03/08  at  07:37 AM

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Good video. Glad you mentioned the Achilles heel of SmoothCam, its need to analyze an entire clip and not what is in the timeline. IMHO this is one of the most boneheaded, overlooked things they could do when bringing SmoothCam to FCP. I have yet to hear a real reason as to why this is. It makes me not use SmoothCam in a lot of instances as I don’t want to stall my edit while I make self-contained Quicktimes of shots. I hope they fix this in new versions of FCP.

Posted by Scott Simmons  on  03/08  at  09:09 AM

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That said though .... SmoothCam can do some amazing things with your shaky video!

Posted by Scott Simmons  on  03/08  at  09:10 AM

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