Stabilizing Your Video Footage, Part 1

So there I was at the Lincoln Memorial in the Washington, D.C. humid heat, glad I carried a monopod but wishing I had a tripod—a pretty common emotion that I experience when shooting with a single stick. The shot wasn't much, just a simple zoom in, but it's impossible to perform smoothly without three legs. "Oh," I thought, "I'll just fix it in post." Then I got back home, and recalled Apple Final Cut Pro SmoothCam's glacial rendering time, and remembered reading that Motion has a stabilization effect, as well. "Hmm," I thought, "common enough problem, there have got to be some third-party solutions. Let's turn it into an episode of Final Cut Pro Insider."

So here we are. In this issue, I'll discuss the image stabilization task in general, and analyze the usability, quality, and performance of Final Cut's SmoothCam filter and Motion's Stabilize behavior. In essence, these are the free tools that you likely already have. In the next issue, I'll compare these to three other image stabilization filters available from third parties; specifically Red Giant Software Magic Bullet Steady ($199), the Image Stabilizer in CHV-Electronics MotionTracker-collection ($69) and the Boris FX Boris Continuum Optical Stabilizer Mac ($99).

Figure 1. Choosing between Smoothing and Stabilization in Apple Motion.

Let's start with a look at the type of tasks that we want our image stabilization functions to perform. Basically, there are two: image stabilization and smoothing.

Regarding image stabilization, this refers to a more or less static clip shot without a tripod that you just want to stabilize. A good example is this shot of Old Time band Sugar Hill at a long past Galax Fiddler's Convention. Chasing my two then-toddler daughters around, even a monopod was beyond my carrying ability, but as you can see, Apple's Motion locks the image down like a fine Manfrotto tripod.

In contrast, smoothing features smooth out camera motion, whether simple zooming, like the Lincoln Memorial clip that started this review process.

Or a more complicated shot from the Munich Museum of Modern Art (Pinakothek der Moderne) showing how the simple bug evolved into a Porsche 911. In both cases, SmoothCam makes the camera motion appear much smoother.

Interestingly, not all tools perform both functions equally well. For example, Final Cut Pro's SmoothCam feature doesn't differentiate between the two operations in the user controls, and while competent at stabilization, doesn't seem capable of truly locking the camera down like Apple Motion. In contrast, in Motion, you can choose between the Smoothing and Stabilize functions, and the tool customizes its approach for each task, performing both very well.

Table 1. Performance ratings for all contenders, full ratings for the two Apple products.

Beyond competence at smoothing and stabilization, how do we differentiate between the various alternatives? Well, speed has always been a perceived negative for SmoothCam, though Motion turns out to be the tortoise in this comparison. Note that speed trials shown in Table 1 are for the 27-second Pinakothek der Moderne Porsche clip, as produced on my 2.93GHz dual-processor, quad-core Mac Pro workstation. Four of the five tools analyzed the video footage before applying the smoothing filter, and then you had to render to preview the results. With MotionTracker-collection from CHV-Electronics, there was no analysis phase; you simply applied the filter and rendered.

More on the performance of SmoothCam and Motion below in the individual reviews.

Note that I'll complete the chart for the other three products in the next review; I just wanted you to benefit from the performance times to understand when you might want to seek a third-party solution to augment or replace those supplied by Apple.

Comparative usability is also a big factor for me. From my perspective, there's little appeal in a stabilization tool that comes with a learning curve, especially since SmoothCam is so easy to apply and use. Motion is also fairly easy to use. As you'll learn next time, though, you'll need a peek at the user manual to get the most out of some of the third-party tools. Obviously, stability is always a factor in our technology selection process; though both Apple products were perfect in this regard, I ran into some issues with one of the third-party tools.

Figure 2. Note the Auto Zoom checkbox in the Magic Bullet Stabilizer filter.

Another factor I considered in usability was how the tool dealt with frame edges. Specifically, all stabilization tools pan around the clip to offset the motion in the clip, which causes frame edges to appear in the video unless the filter zooms into the clip to offset the corrective motion. Some tools, like SmoothCam, automatically perform this zooming without asking, which is the best approach. Other tools force you to zoom manually, which is the worst approach, since you have to set the zoom and then manually scan through the file to see if all the edges are gone. In the middle are tools that let choose to autozoom, like Magic Bullet shown Figure 2, which eliminates the edges, but only if you're aware of the problem and know to look for the solution.

With this as background, let's spend a bit of time looking at the two Apple stabilization tools.

Figure 3. Final Cut Pro's easy-to-use SmoothCam feature.

For the record, SmoothCam is a Final Cut Pro filter that you can find and apply in the Video Filters > Video subfolder in Final Cut Pro's Effects browser. Coming into this review, my recollection was that SmoothCam required roughly forever to analyze a clip, though in head-to-head comparisons, performance really wasn't really that bad. I did take a peek at Activity Monitor during the analysis phase, however, and found room for improvement, with only about 20 percent of the available CPU power used. Note that you can continue editing while Final Cut Pro performs the SmoothCam analysis, as you can with the Magic Bullet Steady effect, but you can't do so with Boris' or CHV-Electronics' offerings.

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Stabilizing Your Video Footage, Part 2 Stabilizing shaky footage and smoothing out camera motion are problems that you'll periodically face. Last time out, I looked at how well Apple Final Cut Pro's SmoothCam filter and Apple Motion's Stabilize function performed. In this article, I'll look at Red Giant Software Magic Bullet Steady and the Boris Continuum Optical Stabilizer Mac...

Of course, the biggest knock against SmoothCam is that Final Cut Pro analyzes the entire clip to apply the effect, not just the portion on the timeline. So if you needed to smooth 20 seconds from a 60-minute clip, Final Cut Pro would analyze the entire 60 minutes—unless, of course, you did what any sane person would do and exported a QuickTime Reference Movie containing just the critical 20 seconds. Note that creating a subclip won't do; you have to create a separate file.

As discussed above, SmoothCam was excellent when smoothing motion, but not the best at stabilization functions. From a usability standpoint, SmoothCam is the easiest function around; just apply the filter, let Final Cut Pro analyze, and render the timeline to preview your results. The default configuration worked well in both smoothness-related tests, and messing with the controls didn't improve the results in the stabilization test. As mentioned, SmoothCam automatically zooms into the clip to hide any frame edges, which is the best approach.

Finally, SmoothCam proved stable in all of my tests.

Now let's turn our attention to Motion.

Figure 4. Motion's Stabilize behavior.

Though you can import your clip directly into Motion and apply the behavior there, the workflow I used was to deploy the clip in Final Cut Pro, then right-click the clip in the timeline and choose Send To > Motion Project. Name the new project, and Final Cut Pro substitutes the Motion project for the clip in the timeline. Motion's image stabilization function is a behavior that you apply by choosing Behavior > Motion Tracking > Stabilize.

Motion's configuration options are straightforward. First you choose the Quality (Better or Faster), then the Method (Stabilize or Smooth). You can elect to Zoom away any borders, which you'll likely want to do in most cases, or select Normal to view the edges. You can choose which dimension to apply the corrective adjustments to (Horizon, Vertical or both), and whether to adjust for position, scale, and/or rotation. When stabilizing a clip, you can add the tracker shown, which typically won't improve your results, but may cut analysis time, since Motion only analyzes the selected region, not the entire frame.

Figure 5. Applying the Stabilize behavior in Motion.

Once you've set your configuration options, click Analyze, and Motion analyzes your clip. You can preview and make any adjustments in Motion, then save your project, which updates it in the Final Cut Pro timeline. If you want to make any further changes to the clip, right-click and choose Open in Editor, which opens the project back in Motion.

The biggest knock against Motion is performance, which was the slowest by far. A glance at Activity Monitor during the analyz revealed why; my eight-core workstation was 93 percent idle during the long analysis phase—hopefully an inefficiency that Apple can address in the next update.

In terms of quality, Motion produced excellent results for both stabilization and smoothing, though SmoothCam's faster rendering times make it the tool of choice for smoothing. As with SmoothCam, Motion ran through our tests without a hiccup, so stability was also excellent.

Between the two Apple stabilization functions, you can create excellent quality for both smoothing and stabilization. The primary reason to look elsewhere relates to performance. That's it for this time. Next time, we take a look at the three third-party tools.