Subtitles of the Movie

This movie will cover using the Smooth Cam node. The Smooth Cam node, found in the Transform tool tab, looks at the whole image in its evaluation of how a shot is moving. It can remove shakiness from a pan or tilt shot, or it can lock down a shot and stabilize the subject matter. But you'll still have motion blur and perspective distortion, which may create unwanted effects. And if you're using interlaced video, be sure that you deinterlace it in your file in source tab under deinterlacing; and I've set mine to Odd because it's DV. Let's take a look at the smooth cam node. I select my file in, I go to Transform, and I choose Smooth Cam. There are two inputs. The first one is for your filed in sequence and the second one is for a matte to tell smooth cam which areas to ignore while analyzing your image. White areas are ignored and black areas are attended to. First we need to analyze our image. I set my analysis range 1-100 it defaulted to the frame range of my file in. I set my analysis quality to normal, and then I go ahead and hit Analyze. Now that it's done gathering all the data, I'm going to use the data to smooth out the camera move. I can tell that the data's been analyzed because it says Processed Range, and there's a range here. So I set this to smooth, and in the smooth sub parameters, I have a translation smooth, rotation smooth, and zoom smooth. These sliders, if I move them up, smooth more changes in translation, more changes in rotation, more changes in zoom; and if I slide them down, they smooth fewer changes. If I know that one of these aspects is not moving or not changing at all, I should set its value to zero for best results. Let me scroll through, and I see that it's still pretty shaky. So let's try steady mode lock instead. In the lockdown sub parameters I have an inverse transform parameter. I'm going to set this to Lock so that it locks down this image. To match another shot to this one, I would attach another node to the smooth cam node instead of my original pool and change the inverse transform to match. Then I would composite that matched piece back to my original footage using a layering node. But for our purposes we're just locking this image down. So I set this to Lock, and I'm also going to lock my rotations, my zoom, and my perspective; and look, it's completely locked down. We do have those distortions and the motion blur that I was telling you about but it does look as if the shot were more or less done on a tripod. To improve your smooth cam output, there's a few things that you can do. You can adjust these different lockdown parameters if you're using Lock. If you're using Smooth, you can adjust these smoothing parameters, and if it still isn't the way you want it, change your analysis to high and reanalyze. Now when I set this to Lock, I notice that there are these black borders that are cropping up on the edges. If this bugs you, you can try to adjust the clip mode first. Choose Union to render out a giant output that includes the full size of each frame. Pick Intersection to render out a smaller output that cuts off any black areas. Use In to get the same size output as your input with a moving black frame depending on where your shot is being smoothed or locked. Or what you can do is choose Clip Mode In and then apply a transform scale or move 2D node in order to remove your black areas by enlarging your output image. You will end up with a blurrier image, however. Or you can use an Image Quick Paint node to clone in missing areas using the reveal brush to paint in lost areas with a background plate even. Watch the movies on using Quick Paint to learn how to use this node. Alternatively, you can use the Warp nodes, or the Transform Corner Pin in order to warp your edges to fit the frame. You can learn more about the warp nodes in the movies about the Warp tool tab. To sum up, the smooth cam node is a helpful way to smooth out a bumpy pan or to lock down a messy camera move. This can be used to isolate a subject, especially when the stabilize node doesn't do the trick. Smooth cam controls your translation, rotation, zoom, and perspective, and all of these can be adjusted in the parameters.