Kevin McGowan's Blog

Adobe After Effect CS5.5, released just a few days ago, has a new video stabilization tool call “Warp Stabilizer”.  After watching some impressive looking demos, I wanted to try out the new tool myself.  What makes this tool more interesting than some other options out there is that Warp Stabilizer can correct some of the rolling shutter and “jello” issues that occur with DSLR video.  When I’ve used stabilizing software on DSLR footage in the past, I gotten images that were steady, but had major distortion.

SmoothCam vs. Warp Stabilizer from Kevin McGowan on Vimeo.

The Results:

Clip 1
Smoothcam levels out the shot, but adds jitters near the end.  WarpStabilizer makes the shot completely level, without any jitters.  However, the resulting image is a little softer.  I believe this was caused by turn WS’s  ”Rolling Shutter Ripple” to enhanced reduction.  Changing this setting removed some warping effects I was seeing, but had the side effect of changing the image.

Clip 2
Both Smoothcam and WarpStabilizer fail to make this shot usable.  The shot is very shaky and the camera moves at near the same time as the subject moves, which further confuses both stabilizers.  When I attempted to use WarpStabilizer to remove the “jello” the results were awful.  For WS to fix jello it needs to be able to detect the fore-ground and back-ground of a shot.  Since the actor in this shot is right up against the door, WS can’t tell which is which.

Clip 3
WarpStabilizer makes the camera movement a litte smoother than Smoothcam in this shot.  In general, stabilization software crops your shot.  WS has a feature called “Synthesize Edges” which will re-draw the edges of your frame so you can avoid cropping. It did work well on this shot, because one of the musician’s faces is right at the edge of the frame.  The lesson here, if you are going to be doing any stabilization, don’t have anything important happening on the edge of your frame.

Clip 4
I was very impressed with how WarpStabilizer saves this shot.  In this shot, WS can easily tell the difference between the foreground and background (even with the rack focus).

This year I made my first trip to NAB.  In future posts I’ll talk about the show floor and my last post was about the sneak peak of the new Final Cut.  While all that stuff is flashy, new and fun, the part of my trip that I know I will benefit from for years is the classes I took at Post Production World.  The classes are taught by working professional and the top of the line professional instructors.  Many of the  instructors  you’ll recognize from Lynda.com, Focal Press books, or the websites like Creative Cow.  In other words, people who know their craft and know how to teach it.

At first, I wasn’t sure how much I could learn from these classes.  After all, I went to college for media production and since then I’ve kept on top of new technologies.  I  shot and edited a great deal of video.  What could I learn?  Turns out there was a lot out there to learn.  But that’s true for EVERYONE.  Everyone, from someone picking up a camera for the first time, to someone who has been editing for twenty years, there’s always a great deal of new things to learn.

You need to spend 20% of your working time learning new skills or you will become obsolete. -Phil Hodgett

I’m paraphrasing the above quote form Phil Hodgett who was one of the instructors at PPW (in fact I wasn’t there when he said it, but my friend Mike Tomei was and he told me all about it).  Of all the things said at PPW this really hit me.  If you want to be a media production professional, you need to put a serious amount of time into improving your skills. I took 15 classes at PPW and I certainly have a few new skills and tricks that I want to try out.  Out of the 40+ hours of instruction here are the six lesson I think will be most useful.

1. Optical Flow, from Power Workflows in FCP taught by Steve Martin.
   Ever had to slow down footage in Final Cut and not been too happy with how it looked? Footage slowed down in FCP looks choppy. The quick fix is to send that clip to motion and slow it down there. Under “timing” in the properties tab in Motion, adjust the speed of your clip.  Then change the frame blending option to “Optical Flow”.  The resulting footage will take a little while to render, but it will look much smoother than the footage FCP would produce.
2. Soundtrack Frequency View, from Master Audio in Soundtrack taught by Steve Martin
   In Soundtrack you can switch from viewing the waveform to viewing the frequency spectrum.  To do this, click on the box in the upper right hand corner that I’ve circled in the image above.  You can then use the frequency selection tool (circled in the upper left hand side) to select part a range of frequencies in your file.  This is a very handy way to delete certain frequencies when your audio has electrical hums.
3. Music Video Slates, from Music Video Workflow taught by Tim Dashwood
   When making music videos, I’ve been reling on PluralEyes to synch up my footage.  (You play the song back on set and then PluralEyes will use the scratch audio from your camera to synch the shots to the studio audio recording).  There is a cheap, easy and more professional way of doing this.  In your editing software make a video that features the audio track of the song and a video display of the timecode.  You’ll then load this video onto a iPhone, iPad, laptop, etc and use it both as a slate and a the playback source while on set.  You will get more accurate results than you would with just PluralEyes and you’ll seem more professional.
4. How to Read Video Scopes, from Color Correction taught by Abba Shapiro
   I’m going to cover color grading in-depth in a future post.   Understand what all these crazy lines and graphs mean might just be the most useful skill I picked up, it would be this one.
5. Keyboard short cuts to adjust Kerning/Tracking, from Typography for Video Editors taught by Ian Robinson
   In many program (like PhotoShop and Motion) you can adjust the tracking and kerning with a very simple keyboard shortcut.  Please your curser where you want to adjust the spacing.  Press opt (on Macs) + the right arrow key to increase the spacing and opt + left arrow key to decrease the spacing.  It also works if you select multiple characters.
6. Photovision Calibration Targets, from HDSLR classes taught by Raymond Schlogel
   
   I’m guilty of something I expect many people are, I know I should shoot gray cards, but almost never do. The main reason I don’t is they are a pain to carry around as they can be bulky and fragile.  Enter these flex-fill-like gray cards from PhotoVision.  Easy to carry, relatively inexpensive, and gives you an accurate way to white balance when shooting and color correct when in post.

All of the classes I took:

• Power Workflows in FCP, Steve Martin
• Expert to Master: Advance Techniques for FCP, Abba Shapiro & Jeff Greenberg
• Color Correction, Abba Shapiro
• Live Streaming, Alex Lindsay
• Indie Film Audio, Jeff Fisher
• Master Audio in Soundtrack, Steve Martin
• Cutting Edge Compression, Jeff Greenberg
• Documentary Production Techniques – Hicks/Balog
• Lightweight Lighting Strategies, James Ball
• Getting Started with After Effects, Luisa Winters
• HDSLR Tips and Tricks, Raymond Schlogel & Douglas Spotted Eagle
• Titling with Motion, Mark Spencer
• Typography for Video Editors, Ian Robinson
• Music Video Workflow, Tim Dashwood
• HDSLR – Run & Gun, Raymond Schlogel & Douglas Spotted Eagle

In conclusion, I couldn’t recommend PPW more.

The Final Cut Pro User Group gathering, SuperMeet, was the most exciting event at NAB this year.  FCPUG always has a big event during NAB, featuring presentations from profesional editors, software companies, and a huge raffle.  This year, Apple bumped all the planned speakers (such as Kevin Smith) to show a sneak of the new Final Cut Pro.  As someone who retinely watches live blogging of Apple press conferences, it was it pleased the Apple nerd in me to no end to be in the room the first time the new Final Cut was demoed to the public.

The event began with a powerpoint keynote presentation about Final Cut and then had a demo both by Apple engineers who worked on designing the software.  While there is still a lot of unanswered questions about the new software, there’s plenty to be excited about.

The most exciting things we learned about FCPX:

1. Magnetic Clips/Non-destructive Editing
   Anyone who has spent time using the current Final Cut (or any NLE, or even flatbed editing for that matter) knows that you need to put a great deal of effort and care in making sure that any edit you make don’t affect clips in the “future”.   You may just want to make one shot a second shorter, but suddenly every shot after that shot is now a second off.  In the current FCP, only synched audio clips will move, but any other tracks that you have manually synched to a clip (click sound effects, music, titles) will be off. 

   Enter FCPX where you can “magnetically” link multiple audio and video clips together.  Once you link the clips, it’s imposible for you to unlink them by making changes elsewhere on your timeline.  If you want to cut your audio form one shot overlap the next shot, don’t worry about a clip collision, simply drag the audio over and the other track will automatically get out of the way.  It’s something I never exactly thought of as a problem with Final Cut, but once I  saw it in action I was wowed by how powerful and simple it was.  Why hasn’t it aways been this way.

2. Tons of Nesting
   True, there is nesting in the current FCP, but now nesting has become a lot more useful.  If you bring in a video with synched audio that are linked together in a “nested” shot.  On your timeline they are one item (unlike the three items they would be in the current FCP).  You can also nest together groups of shots (or entire scenes).  That way, if you had a feature film, you could have could have only one item on your timeline for each scene.  At any time you could than clip into that scene to make edits, all the while care free from the worries that your edits will affect clips later in the timeline.  Trust me, this is very very cool.
3. Native Editing
   Instead of having to convert everything to ProRes, in FCPX you can edit H.264 and AVCHD natively (as a AVCHD shooter, I cheered when they announced this part).
4. Price
   It’s $300.  Everyone can afford that.  It makes the $500 price tag for the Adobe half-update look even more ridiculous.

I conclusion, FCPX is going to be a must have program.  Also, I didn’t win anything in the raffle.