The best way to see what it can do is look at it in action. First is a shot that I was trying to hold as still as possible with my fake Fig Rig. It’s not too bad but could use some smoothing out. It’s a 5 second piece of a 9.5 second total shot at 1440×1080 ProRes resolution (it was converted from HDV). Magic Bullet Steady took 5 seconds to analyze the shot and about 10.5 seconds to render. Apple’s built-in Smoothcam took 1 minute 5 seconds to analyize the shot and 14 seconds to render. This was on a Mac Pro Quad-core 3 ghz. Here is the result, with the MB Steady option toggled through its 3 different motion parameters:

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Magic Bullet Steady test from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.

Now, Final Cut Pro has the built-in SmoothCam and you might wonder why you would need Magic Bullet Steady when you already have SmoothCam. From the clip above you can see that SmoothCam does a great job. While SmoothCam is a very good tool it has become legendary for analyzingly long analysis times. This is often due to (IMHO) a fatal flaw in SmoothCam where it has to analyze the entire master clip of the shot it has been applied to. If you use 3 seconds of a 20 minute shot it will analyze all 20 minutes. If you are on a PowerPC machine then get ready for a long, long, long, long, long wait. Did I say it’s a long wait? The above clip was only a 9.5 second master shot but if you capture whole tapes at once you can see where this could be a problem. Of course a workaround is to render a QuickTime of that 3 second shot and cut it back into your edit. That works to shorten the analysis time dramatically but if you have more than a few shots this can be quite time consuming. Magic Bullet Steady only has to analyze what is used in the timeline.

Steady-ing software works best on things with moderate movement and shake but you can throw it on a handheld tracking shot or a pan as well. It’s success depends on the motion and how much time you are willing to fiddle with the settings. You often have to be willing to accept some strange bending, flexing and jitter of the final shot for something with a lot of movement as you can see from the handheld tracking shot below. For best results spend time tweaking the settings. SmoothCam seems to produce a better result on tracking types of shots.

Magic Bullet Steady handheld tracking test from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.

Another example is below of a pan:

Magic Bullet Steady pan from Scott Simmons on Vimeo.

Magic Bullet Steady produced great results with this shot where SmoothCam caused some strobing in the movement of the car and had to really zoom in on the shot quite a bit. Again, you often have to adjust the settings for the best results but it’s also nice to get good results from the default settings when you are in a hurry.

Magic Bullet Steady has quite a few more setting options than SmoothCam including the ability to set a manual detection region and a scene change detection function if you apply Steady to a completed edit like a self-contained QuickTime:

A quirk I did notice is that the product is called Magic Bullet Steady but it listed under the FCP effect menu as Stabilize. Overall Steady’s biggest advanatge is speed. It doesn’t have to analyize the entire unused media, only what’s in the timeline which can be the difference between using it and not using SmoothCam. It also renders faster than SmoothCam. After a shot is analyzed it then has to be rendered, both with Steady and SmoothCam. But SmoothCam seems to do a better job on tracking shots or shots with extreme movement. But if your shot has extreme shake and movement in them do they really need to be in the edit anyway? Truth be told it’s often been a trial and error process applying both to certain shots that I had to smooth out and deciding which one looked best. Since SmoothCam is included in a Final Cut Studio 2 install and Magic Bullet Steady is available as a demo you can try for yourself before buying. While Magic Bullet Steady is available as a stand-alone product the best deal is to pick up the entire Magic Bullet 2008 suite since it’s included as part of that install. Then you have Steady and a lot more tools at your disposal.

Does that say 14 hours?

Yessssssssssssssssssss it does.

There’s a great thread at the Apple support forums called the SmoothCam dirty little secret about the massively huge analysis times for the magic camera stabilization tool in Final Cut Pro 6 known as SmoothCam. Yep, they are quite large. According to the FCP 6 user manual this is how SmoothCam works:

Unlike other filters in Final Cut Pro, the SmoothCam filter must analyze a clip’s entire
media file before the effect can be rendered or played in real time. Using the
SmoothCam filter requires two independent phases:
Motion analysis: Pixels in successive frames are analyzed to determine the direction of
camera movement. Analysis data is stored on disk for use when calculating the effect.
Motion compensation: During rendering or real-time playback, the SmoothCam filter
uses the motion analysis data to apply a four-corner transformation to each frame,
compensating for camera movement.

It is indeed a 2 step process and that first step is a biggie. The manual suggests using a Quicktime Reference file to cut down on the huge analysis time. Do you really need to do that? I ran a little test on some HDV footage with my dual 2.7 G5 and here are the results.

I took a 1 minute and 35 second (01:35:26 to be exact) shot that is its own individual Quicktime file and edited a 12 second 26 frame shot into a sequence. I then exported that same 12:26 shot to a Quicktime Reference file as suggested in Chapter 22 of the manual, Using the SmoothCam Filter. The result? The near 13 second Quicktime reference clip nearly an hour to analyze:

13 Sec. self-contained masterclip – HDV

The other 13 second shot that was part of the original one and a half minute master clip, 5 hours:
13 Sec. clip part of 1.5 minute masterclip – HDV

After setting up this little test I read another test that suggested the huge analysis times might be a result of the HDV codec and its mpeg/i frame existence. So I then exported these same clips using Apple’s ProRes 422 codec.

The 13 second self-contatined Quicktime in ProRes 422, around 36 minutes:

13 Sec. self-contained masterclip – ProRes 422 (HQ)

The 13 second ProRes 422 cut that was still part of the original one and a half minute converted master clip:

13 Sec. clip part of 1.5 minute masterclip – ProRes 422 (HQ)

A bit less time but not by much. HDV file sizes and data rates are quite small while the file sizes and data rates of the ProRes 422 (HQ) clips are very large. So just for comparison I exported the same clips as DV-NTSC to see the difference.

13 Sec. self-contained masterclip – DV

13 Sec. clip part of 1.5 minute masterclip – DV

So from the looks of this informal little test it seems as if the SmoothCam analysis speed has many factors that contributes to how fast or slow it can analyze a clip. HDV clips have low file size and data rates but the complicated i-frame compression seems to cause a lot more difficulty in analysis, kind of like conforming HDV for an output to tape. It’s a no-brainer that regular DV25 resolution would be fastest since it has small data rates and frame sizes. Just because we can, let’s try it with DVCPRO-HD 720 files:

13 Sec. self-contained masterclip – DVCPRO-HD 720p60

13 Sec. clip part of 1.5 minute masterclip – DVCPRO-HD 720p60

It makes sense that DVCPRO-HD 720 would be somewhere in the middle. What this tells me is to take the analysis time into consideration when using SmoothCam. If you can build that time into the edit it will produce amazing results. To see the “snake shot” before and after SmoothCam, or side by side, have a look at the H.264 Quicktime clips below:

snake shot WITH SmoothCam – 1.4 mb

snake shot WITHOUT SmoothCam – 2 mb

both snake shots SIDE BY SIDE – 2.6 mb

As you can see it works pretty well, kind of like the Steady Shot mode on a Sony camcorder. Of course all this can be avoided by just using a tripod!