This is a test of Final Cut Pro's "SmoothCam" motion stabilization filter. I've set two videos side-by-side. On the left, the original clip. On the right, the SmoothCam version with the following settings:

Auto Scale: 1
Actual Scale: 138%
Translation Smooth: 1.5
Rotation Smooth: 2
Scale Smooth: 0
Mix: 100

The original clip was shot with a Canon HV20 mounted on a Steadicam Merlin, so it was fairly smooth to begin with. I was pleased with how well the SmoothCam filter ironed out the rotational skewing of the camera without being noticeable about it. I do wish the filter didn't autoscale the entire clip to match the worst of the movement, and instead the adjusted clip could start with the wide and then smoothly scale in to cover the adjustments, then smoothly scale out for segments that were more stable. Had I shot with a higher shutter speed, the motion blur on the subject wouldn't be as bad.

I'm sure I'll end up using this SmoothCam filter on some footage one of these days. It's a nice effect.

-Z

PS. I've written in my blog how to set Final Cut Pro to do batch motion analysis on a large set of clips overnight, so that if the SmoothCam filter is applied to any of them later it has data to work with and its effect can be seen right away.

zachfine.com/blog/2009/03/23/final-cut-pro-can-batch-analyze-clips-for-stabilization-in-the-background-yet/