I'm taking a documentary editing class at Cuyahoga Community College, in Cleveland, OH. The facilites are top-notch and I can't wait to start my next class.

Anyways, this is a Smoothcam test to show to my fellow classmates. Some students were asking about stabilizing some of their documentary footage using Smoothcam.

So I want to show my classmates what Smoothcam actually does to your footage.

How it works:
(If my description of how this works isn't in-depth enough for you, then Google it. I'm a filmaker, not a software engineer.)
Smoothcam analyzes your footage, then distorts, rotates and slides it around the frame to keep motion smooth and centered.

Unfortunatly, when it rotates and distorts the footage, you can see the edges of the video frame. So Smoothcam then has to zoom-in to your footage to cover the missing edges. Check out my example.

What you are seeing:
(Yes, the footage has been color-corrected. Maybe not "corrected," but tweaked to my liking.)

The upper left window shows my original footage, straight out of the camera. I either had in-camera image stabilization on (which does the opposite in come cases), or I just wasn't smooth enough with the camera. Either way, the video is jumpy and not smooth at all.

The lower window shows the Smoothcam analysis, with no zooming. Look at the edges of the video frame and how they distort and move around. This is Smoothcam smoothing out my footage.

The upper right window is the final video, zoomed in to cover the moving video edges.

The Result:
Smoothcam did a passable job on my slightly un-smooth footage. Notice just how much the video frame moves around in the lower window. My footage wasn't super bad, just a bit shakey, and Smoothcam had to move the video frame around quite a bit.

Trying to stabilize anything that isn't already passably smooth doesn't work very well.
The Original:
Here's the original video I took this snippet of footage from:

http://www.exposureroom.com/quintanatahover