Weekend and SmoothCam!2

Hey everyone! Just thought I’d post something before I went to bed.

Still writing the script for “Derby”, about 20 pages in now and hopefully I’ll be done with a first draft of it sometime next week, which means I’ll probably start sending some copies around to friends and fellow filmmakers for comments and tips. Been a busy week, with a test in Physics last Monday (which went…well, as I predicted. Let’s leave it at that ) and a speech on how the human skeleton develops with age which I delievered today in Biology. It’s great to finally be greated by another weekend again – although I have to do some studying. Earlier today, Johannes sent me a website he’s been working on for a project in school, which once again got me inspired to do some kind of minor redesign to the website. It should logistically work in the same way with navigation and stuff, but I’m looking towards a somewhat cleaner look with better possibilities to stream video directly on the website and much more.

I’ve just imported some old “16″ and “Zombie Exterminator” into Final Cut Pro on the Mac and tried out a few functions I’ve missed out on using my previous editing suites. One function which I found particulary spiffy is the “SmoothCam” filter that basically fixes shaky camera motion pretty much automatically. I applied it to a clip from “Zombie Exterminator” to see what it could fix on default settings, and I was so stunned by the result that I just had to show it to you. It’s about 13 seconds long and includes a before (appropriately labeled “Pre-Kickass”) and an after (“Post-Kickass”) comparision. I guess I could get even better results if I played around with some of the settings, but as it is right now, I’m pretty damn impressed! And yeah, I just had to add some spiffy grading and glow to the “After” clip.

SmoothCam Before/After comparision (approx 2 Mb)
[flv:http://rhp.se/news/040408/ze-smoothcam.flv 480 270]

Oh, and I’m going to come up with a good April Fool’s joke for next year. Promise. Talk to you all again soon! Take care!