Final Cut and SmoothCam

"Final Cut Studio 2 SmoothCam Tested: Fix Those Shaky Shots"

An overview with examples of using SmoothCam in FCP. SmoothCam uses "Optical Flow", which is technology imported from Shake, to the new Final Cut Suite. Gives some good advice on working with HDV--transcode to ProRes422 to dramatically reduce processing time. Very impressive what it does with shots from a car. Seems like Apple's SmoothCam is providing a great tool for removing unwanted motion in a shot. However, I think its value for interlaced standard-definition video is low because you lose so much resolution from the de-interlacing and the scaling that SmoothCam does. But I guess I should try it out before I make any judgments.

UPDATE: There are some more in-depth tests at The Edit Blog. Apparently, when you execute SmoothCam, FCP analyzes the entire source clip and not just what is cut into the timeline. The Edit Blog notes some improvement from using ProRes422 over HDV (36 min. vs. 53 min. on a 12.5 sec clip). But it looks like the big improvements in analysis time cited above are probably confounded by the creation of a smaller source clip when the video was transcoded to ProRes 422. [via FreshDV]

Bottom line: The results are good but the analysis time on SmoothCam is slow. Dual 2.7 G5 estimated 5 hours to process one and half minutes of HDV. Did I mention that the analysis takes place in the background, so you can keep working while FCP analyzes the clip?