To install you must first download and unstuff the file. This will create a folder with this manual and the fxStabilizer plug-ins.

To copy these files:

1) Quit “iMovie”.

2) Open your Hard Drive image or a “Finder” window and click on your“Home” folder which should then change to a window similar to this:

3) Open the “Library” folder

4) Open the “iMovie” folder. If there is not yet an “iMovie” folder, justcreate one yourself.

5) Once inside the “iMovie” folder, open the “Plug-ins” folder. If there isnot yet a “Plug-ins” folder, just create one yourself. Pay attention tospelling as these folders are used by iMovie to load your custom effects plug-ins.

6) For the Pro version, move the following plug-in files into this “Plug-ins” folder:

fxStabilizer Pro
fx Zoom and Pan
fx TV Safe Zoom
fx Picture KBE

For the Standard version, move the following plug-in files into this“Plug-ins” folder:

fxAnimate
fxStabilizer
fx KBE PAN 4
fx KBE PAN 3
fxStabilizer for Zoom/Pan
fx Ken Burns Effect
fx KBE PAN 1
fx KBE PAN 2

7) Open “iMovie”.

 

Registration:

Please register your copy of fxStabilizer at our website to stay informed ofcurrent versions and bug fixes.

http://digitalthoughtsoftware.com/fx/register.html

Contact Information :

Registered users are eligible for free email technical support. Email yoursupport questions to support@digitalthoughtsoftware.com. Any other questions or information about the fxStabilizer plug-in, pleaseemail to questions@digitalthoughtsoftware.com.

Credits

Software adapted to Mac OSX...................................................Rod Kent
Website.....................................................................................Mike Long
Manual.......................................................................................Dave Jones
Original software (Deshaker for PC)..........................................Gunnar Thalin

 

Applying the fxStabilizer Effects

1) Open “iMovie” along with your movie project.

2) Select your movie clip in your movie.

3) Select “Effects” from the toolbar

4) Scroll through the various plug-ins that are already installed and select“FX Stabilizer” or “FX Stabilizer (Zoom/Pan)”. See note on theoptions below.

5) Click on the “Apply” button and the plug-in will begin to perform itsmagic!

NOTE: Use the default settings first and experiment later. NOTE: Preview and “Effect In” and “Effect Out” are not possible withthis plug-in. Apply the effect first before you apply any cross scene fadeeffects.

fxStabilizer will make 2 passes over your video clip. The first pass, is a pre-rendering phase in which the best guess will be made as to what constitutesshaking vs. normal video action. The stabilizer will determine a path through the scene in which to correct the video and create several complex mathematical equations. The second pass will actually adjust each videoframe accordingly.

 

The first phase will show aprogress bar like this:

After this phase, the normal plug-in progress bar will show in the video cliparea like so: The fxStabilizer can be applied multiple times to a video segment, which can result in an even smoother video clip. Experiment and see for yourself.

 

 

iMovie, Macintosh, OSX are all registered trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.

 

fx Stabilizer Pro (Pro Version Only)

Settings -- Pass 1:

Block size

The width and height of the blocks used during the image matching.

Scale

The maximum scale to do the image matching on. Full is best but very slow.

Use pixels

How many pixels in the blocks to actually use when matching. All is best but very slow.

Color mode

The image matching can be made in color or grayscale. Grayscale is a little faster but the matching is worse. This setting has nothing to do with the color of the final output of pass 2.

Initial search range

In the most reduced scale this percentage gives the maximum shift while matching. Lower = slightly faster.

Differential search range

When going from a reduced scale to twice the size, the filter already has approximate shifts. The differential search range is how many pixels up, down, left and right from these approximate shifts to look when matching. Lower values make processing a lot faster butif you have very fast/big rotations and/or zooms, matching can fail for some blocks.

Discard motion of blocks that have match value less than X

If the best match value found while matching a certain block is below X this block is discarded. The blocks in higher scales that depend on this block are also discarded. These discarded blocks show no motion vector in the output video of pass 1.

Discard motion of blocks that have 2nd best match larger than best minus X

If the second best match value found while matching a certain block is close to the bestmatch value, this means that the best shift found isn't very reliable. It could just as well be this second shift that's the correct one. For example a blue sky has good match values forall shifts. Settings this parameter correctly discards those unreliable blocks. The blocks in higher scales that depend on these blocks are also discarded. These discarded blocks showno motion vector in the output video of pass 1.

Discard motion of blocks that move more than X pixels in wrong direction.

When calculating the best values for panning, rotation and zoom based on all motionvectors, the filter soon discovers that some blocks have motion that don't quite fit in with the "main motion". If a block has a motion vector that is more than X pixels off this mainmotion it is discarded in order to get more precise values. The motion vectors for these blocks are drawn in red in the output video of pass 1 and are not used in any way. Since the panning, rotation and zoom are all done in only 2 dimensions, it's possible to get a lot of these blocks that don't seem to fit in with the main motion when the effect of perspective gets big. This happens when the camera is set to wide angle and not just rotating (along any axis), but actually moving. Here you should use high X values (or maybe limit the matching area to the most distant parts). When zoomed in a lot or when the camera is stationary, the perspective effect is low and you should use low X values (even 1) to discard motion of smaller objects in the image.

Skip frame if less than X percent of blocks are ok.

If less than X percent of all blocks are ok (i.e. the rest of the blocks have been discarded), skip this frame (set panning and rotation to 0 and zoom scale to 1)

Ignore image area outside area

Only area is used during matching. If you check Let area follow motion, the area will move along with the motion vectors between different frames. You can use it if you want to stabilize on a moving object instead of the background. Just don't expect this to work perfectly :)

Ignore image area inside area

area is not used during matching.

Settings -- Pass 2:

Resampling

The algorithm to use when calculating pixel colors from the source image. Note that none of these are very good when the destination size is a lot lower than the source. Instead, add a separate 2:1 reduction filter (or something) after the fxStabilizer to reduce scale a lot. Edge compensation A side-effect from stabilizing video is black borders. You can choose between doing nothing about this or lower the amount of black borders by applying an adaptive zoom. The second option determines, for each frame, how much zoom is needed to avoid the borders. This additional zoom is then smoothed using the zoom smoothness parameter, so the borders still become visible sometimes. The difference between Adaptive zoom and Adaptive zoom only is that the first one applies the smoothness parameter to both the zoom stabilizing and the adaptive zoom whereas the second one only applies the smoothness parameter to the adaptive zoom and uses no zoom stabilizing. Use the latter if there's no zooming in the video clip. You can also choose Fixed zoom. The filter will then zoom into the video just enough to eliminate the black borders. Use low correction limits (see below) to lower the amount of zoom.

Previous and future frames to fill in borders

This is a kind of additional edge compensation. When the current frame doesn't contain any image data in the "real world area" we want in our output, it can search in past and future frames and use that image data instead. As long as that area is part of the object (or background) that was stabilized on in pass 1, this usually works perfectly. But when other objects move in these areas, it can look a bit strange. It's usually better than black anyway, so I strongly recommend using this feature. Just make sure you crop any borders from the source clip before fxStabilizer. Otherwise this won't work very well at all.

If the current frame is number 50, it searches frames in the following order to find the image data it needs: 50, 49, 51, 48, 52, 47, 53, 46, 54 etc. So for each pixel the closest frame (chronologically) is always used. You can set how many frames to store internally for this feature. More is always better but keep in mind that each frame needs approximately 1.3MB of memory and it can take a long time to search through all frames for image data.

Since iMovie filters can't access future frames, the filter uses a little trick. It collects frames and delays the output by as many frames as you've set for future frames. This causes a couple of problems that can be dealt with pretty easily once you know how. You need to extract the audio and adjust the clip. You can do that in the from the iMovie menu Audio. This feature is not perfect and doesn't work on some types of clips.

Basically, if the clip you want to encode has 100 frames (numbered 0-99 in the source clip), and you use 30 future frames, you should first step manually from 0 to 30. Then, directly after that, encode the frames 30 to 100.

Try using this feature on a clip with lots of panning, and zoom out by setting Extra zoom factor to something like 0.6. Then you'll get a panorama like effect. It's slow, but fun. :)

Extra zoom factor

An additional zoom factor to apply to the video. This can for example be used together with fixed zoom edge compensation to zoom out just enough for the borders to become slightly visible but still remain hidden in the overscan area of the TV. Then you will see more of the video while still not seeing any borders on the TV.

Motion smoothness

These values determine how smooth the motion will be. You can set a parameter to 0 to turn off the smoothing completely. This can be useful if you don't want to stabilize zoom for example. But you must use a rather high zoom smoothness if you use adaptive zoom as edge compensation, or the video will zoom in and out very fast to avoid the borders. The motion smoothness calculation is not time-based but rather based on frame count. If you enter -1 as smoothness you will get "infinite smoothness", meaning the camera will appear to be stationary at the position of the first frame that was processed in pass 1. This feature usually doesn't work perfectly, though.

Max. Correction limits

To keep the corrections (that cause the black borders) small during fast pans (for example), you can limit the maximum corrections. Especially when using fixed zoom as edge compensation these settings keep the zoom from being too large. What these settings really do is automatically lower the motion smoothness values in certain parts of the video when it becomes necessary

Misc. Notes:

If there is no zooming in the video clip, use Adaptive zoom only as edge compensation or if you don't want any edge compensation, set zoom smoothness to 0. This is because the zoom stabilizing can't distinguish between zooming due to the camera moving towards something or if it's actually zooming. You may think it's the same thing, but it isn't, at least not for wide-angle shots.

Often there's conflicting motion of large objects in the video clip. In this case the filter tries to "follow" the motion of the biggest object (usually the background). The setting that discards blocks that move more than X pixels in wrong direction can be used to some extent to control this. A low value makes it follow only the biggest object, while a larger value makes it follow the average motion of all objects (that aren't moving too much in the "wrong" direction). You can also use the image matching area to control which object to follow.

fx TV Safe Zoom
(Pro Version Only)

This plug-in shrinks the video clip so there is no overscan. This is handy when you have text that is in the overscan area that will be clipped when viewed on TV. This is also nice when you convert a PowerPoint slideshow into a movie as it allows you to shrink the entire movie without changing your slides.

Simply select your clip and apply the effect.

fx Zoom and Pan

This plug-in will do a fixed zoom and pan across the whole video clip. If you have a video clip where the main action takes place in a corner of the clip, this plug-in will allow you to pan and zoom the clip so the main action is larger and in the center of the clip.

Settings:

Zoom -- 50% - 200% -- Amount of fixed zoom to do. 200% = 2X
X Axis -- Percent of pixels to pan left or right.
Y Axis -- Percent of pixels to pan top or bottom.

fx Animate

Have some Lego's (TM) lying around? This plug-in will allow iMovie to do stop frame animation. Create a movie set, get your actors in position, and follow these steps:

1) Create a dummy clip or use an existing clip. The plug-in will overwrite it with your animation.

2) Turn the camcorder on (remove the tape, and the camcorder won't auto shut off.)

3) Apply the fxAnimate effect.

4) Two windows will popup. One is the live frame, the other the last recorded frame.

5) Press any key. The plug-in will take up to five snapshots and average them together and add that frame to your clip.

6) Move your actors, the onion skin option will show how much the character has moved from the last frame.

Short cut keys:

'F' - Full size windows
'H' - Half size windows
'Q' - Quarter size windows
'O' - Toggles onion skin mode

Before filming, don't forget to yell "quiet on the set". For a good reference, check out this site: http://www.brickfilms.com/

Settings:

Frame Averaging -- 1-5 -- Number of frames to capture and average to create one frame. Onion Skin -- Yes/No -- Toggles the onion skin mode.

fx Ken Burns Effect

Yet another Ken Burns Effect. And before you start screaming: "I just figured out how toturn off the Ken Burns Effect, why would I want to use yours." Pause and take a deep breath. This plug-in uses the magic of fxStabilizer to do a "pre-control" stabilization. Soyou get a really good sub-pixel-bicubic-resampling (i.e. not so jerky) of your still image, as it slowly does fixed zooms.

Settings:

Zoom -- 75% - 125% --Zooms from a 100% to this zoom at the end of the clip

fx Pan Ken Burn Effect 1-4

These effects do a pan and zoom Ken Burns Effect of your video still clips.

1 - Pans Left to Right, Top to Bottom.
2 - Pans Left to Right, Bottom to Top.
3 - Pans Right to Left, Top to Bottom.
4 - Pans Right to Left, Bottom to Top.

A Cool video tip for still images: import your still image clips, Apply KBE 1, then KBE 2,etc, and add cross dissolves and music.

fx Picture Ken Burns Effect
(Pro Version Only)

This effect will prompt you for a high-resolution still picture. It will then compute theKBE effect using the original picture data. This provides an even smoother and higher quality effect.

Settings:

Zoom -- 75% - 125% -- Zooms from a 100% to this zoom at the end of the clip.
Pan -- 75% - 125% -- Pans this percentage of pixel width of the image size.
Direction -- 1 - 4 -- Pan direction, left to right, top to bottom.