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Is there such a thing as a good "hand-held" plug-in?

Stephen Pruitt

Stephen Pruitt

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Hi all. . .

Due to specific circumstances in a couple of scenes on our film, we had to shoot on either a steadycam or on sticks when we had wanted to do hand-held for a more energetic look.

Is there a program that can effectively mimic the hand-held look? I know I'll lose some resolution and some edges off the frames, but I'm more than willing to loose say 5% or 10% off my frame if it can truly mimic a good hand-held shot.

Any ideas?

Thanks much.

Stephen
 
in nuke there is a cameraShake node... it's incredible, but may take some finesse to get it exactly how you want.
example: http://vimeo.com/10107042
original: http://vimeo.com/9666367

you can also use 3d software using a virtual camera
example: http://vimeo.com/11114883

after effects can use customized wiggle.

all those will take a bit of tweaking and finesse.

after effects or other software like fcp may have a plug in that would be useful, but i'm not sure.

what software do you have available? send me a PM if you like.
 
I thought Genarts Sapphire had something..

I just looked at their website. It's called Shake (not Apple's Shake). I've never used it but shot a music video where it was used in post triggered (I'm pretty sure) by the audio track.
 
yes, shake is nuke's older brother (no longer supported or available, but still awesome!)

you could also use shake.
 
Another way to do it is to find some footage you like that i hand held and then run a plugin to stabilize it/remove camera shake/movement. then you can apply the solution from the hand held footage to the stable version.

Been a long since I did this, but I hope that gives you an idea that is "free" to try.

I did this in Combustion, not that the actual app matters as much as finding the source footage.
 
only certain software packages effectively support that, but that is totally a valid way of working and often produces really good results. he might be trying to do it in software that doesn't have good tracking, or doesn't have any at all. there are other variables, as well, like natural motion blur. it definitely helps to have control of adding more noise to the motion or smoothing it out as desired. and there's also the artistic factor of using it to communicate the story, rather than just randomly wiggle around to look handheld. it's an artistic science.
 
Stephen Pruitt said:
Hi all. . .

Is there a program that can effectively mimic the hand-held look? I know I'll lose some resolution and some edges off the frames, but I'm more than willing to loose say 5% or 10% off my frame if it can truly mimic a good hand-held shot.

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

This has been sorta suggested by others here, but this is a method that will work with software you probably have:

1) Shoot a good tracking target hand-held for the length of the shot you need to add hand-heldness to. (Do a few takes, so you have some choice.)

2) Take that footage and the shot you want to effect into After Effects.

3) Motion-track the target footage.

4) Apply the motion data to the footage you want to effect.

5) Scale up to fill the frame.

6) Render (with motion blur enabled), rinse & repeat for additional shots.

It's a good idea to do the target shoot with a lens similar to the one you're effecting. The motion data seems to scale better that way.
 
No, George, a steadycam looks absolutely nothing like the hand-held look. They are two entirely different things. In fact, a steadycam rig is specifically designed to REMOVE small, random hand-held movements. An Easy Rig-type device looks like hand-held, because it is. A stabilizer is an entirely different animal.

I appreciate these suggestions. I will definitely look into these. We are editing on FCS, so any suggestions that would specifically work on that system would be amazing.

Thanks much!

Stephen
 
motion should have something that you could use... hang on a sec

EDIT: okay, as in after effects there should be a wriggle parameter behavior that you can adjust. i'd look in the documentation (help) and online for tutorials/advice specific to motion. i don't use that software personally, so i'm sorry i can't be any more specific, maybe someone else can. otherwise, PM me and i'll give you a rate you can't resist.
 
paulherrin said:
motion should have something that you could use... hang on a sec

EDIT: okay, as in after effects there should be a wriggle parameter behavior that you can adjust.
Click to expand...

No disrespect to Paul, but it is extraordinarily difficult to adjust the "wriggle parameter" of software and have it look natural. You may be able to do it, but it'll take a long time before it'll make you happy.

Stephen, I don't use FCS at all, so I don't know how to do it there, but the idea I described is not magically tied to AE. It is magically tied to motion tracking. It looks natural because you track real, natural motion. It does require a motion tracker, but any decent motion tracker should work, as long as you can apply the motion data to another video track.
 
haha none taken... i've opened motion once, and never have again for my own reasons.

you're right that it takes some serious programming to get any kind of natural result from wriggle.

just realized you might have access to mocha? use that to track some footage. or you could probably use motion to track it and reapply. it's all the same concept.
 
Final Cut is not the tool for the job.

Motion may have what you need - I've never used it. If it doesn't, it's just as bad as my uninformed opinion of it... If it has a Perlin noise function or something similar, you could use that to build a camera shake plugin if it doesn't already have one.

After Effects, Nuke, Fusion, Shake, Combustion, Flame, etc. all definitely can do this in any of the ways suggested.
 
This is great, guys! Thanks so much!!! I can't wait to try this all out!

It just turns out that I we don't have a crane near large enough to hold a camera and operator and I wanted a crane shot to have a hand-held look. Same for a few steadycam shots I did. Hand-held at that speed would have been WAY too aggressively moving, but I figured that we could do some post work to make it look hand-held.

Generally, I despise fakery of this sort, but in these cases, it just couldn't be helped. Oh, and then there were those few shots where I FORGET to do it hand-held.

:-(

Thanks again!

And happy holidays to you all!

Stephen
 
After Effects motion sketch is perfect for this. Done it many many times, it's very simple and effective. Just make sure you set motion blur and shutter angle for the composition to match your shot.
 
You can get something that may do for your purposes from any of the approaches people have suggested. You just need to tweak it until you get something you are happy with.

Of course it will never look truly like hand held, as the camera's actual position will be moving very smoothly, and you are effectively adding a wobbly nodal pan on top of that. A real hand held shot will have wobbly parallax changes, and nothing in post (other than actually 3D tracking and rebuilding your scene in 3D) can simulate that. Unfortunately the human brain is very good at noticing things that don't look right, even if it's not quite sure why.
 
Hey there, Mr. Marchant. . . and others. . . can you point me to a web-accessible example of how it looks. Nick's comment that it might not "sell" has me a little concerned.

Thanks very much.

Stephen
 
Hi,

I had a similar situation, a scene in which a couple of close up's were on sticks and the rest was hand held. But the close up's didn't fit in the whole scene, so I wanted them to have the same dynamic then the rest.

I re-shot a paper with tracking marks with the same focal lengths on the same distance to mimic the actual shot.

After I tracked the marks, and applied the resulting motion path to the footage.
It worked like a charm, but maybe it's easier to do it in AE or Motion than in FCP.
 
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