Help out a dumb dummy!

Hey all. Total noob here. My wife has fcp and Im in a band. I have to very quickly re-edit our music video that got screwed up in the process. I have a bunch of semi-shaky footage of my bandmate walking, in profile. The shots are meant to keep him in the middle of the frame, but obvuiously many shots have him waver, since it was shot with a guy walking parrallel to the singer, trying to keep perfect pace. He is also at a different distance (not drastic, but enough to make a difference) from the camera in different footage. What I wasnt to accomplish is to have him always be in the middle, always the same approximate size and the shakiness to be gone. What would be the most efficient workflow here? Cropping, stabilizer? Any advice would help.

Thanks!

M

Hi,

What version of FCP is your wife using?

Final Cut Pro X,
thanks!

Select the clip in the timeline by left clicking on the clip
Go to the inspector pane on the right next to the viewer window. If it is not yet open, clicking CMD-4 will toggle it open and close, or you can click the second icon from the right in the toolbar.
In the inspector scroll down to the item "Stabilization".
Click the checkbox of this item so it turns blue.
FCPX will now analyze for stabilization and when it is done you will see some options for smoothing to play with. You can tweak these settings for optimal results.
To see the result in its best quality you want to wait until the clip has rendered in the background and the orange render bar above the clip has disappeared.

Cheers,
Robbert-Jan

Mikhail,

You also should try Lock & Load from Coremelt - it's not cheap. But you have a 15 day free trial.

With FCPX stabilizer - depending on your footage - there often enough is this kind of wobbling effect. (It also can be caused bei your camera and the rolling shutter)
With Lock & Load you can set a ROI which helps to minimize these effects.

Another thing is in case the clip is a bit longer split it into smaller overlapping parts. This helps the tracker to be faster and more accurate. The parts can be merged into one later.

-Andreas