The Tiliam Blog

Musing on technologies for video and cinematography

MotionBend Plugin Has Arrived

We have a big list of ideas for features and improvements for MotionBend, that we hope will make it the ultimate stabilization tool. We are constantly evaluating each idea to decide how difficult it would be to implement and its usefulness. We have a lot of new ideas too so the list is always growing. There are also suggestions from our users and other interested parties. When many people recommend the same feature it goes up in priority on our list. The number one request was for a plugin.

MotionBend Icon fused with FCPX

Finally, MotionBend Plugin is here. Running in Apple Final Cut Pro X and Apple Motion, it is now possible to use MotionBend to stabilize video without leaving your editing environment.

MotionBend running in FCPX

MotionBend running in FCPX

MotionBend running in Motion

MotionBend running in Motion

Development took just over 3 months but a lot of preparation work had been done in advance and the core algorithms are shared with MotionBend Stand-Alone which has been in development for several years.

This is all good news for MotionBend Stand-Alone users, as improvements made to plugin code will also affect the stand-alone and vice-versa. There is already some new code that was required to support the plugin that will now be used to enable new features in the stand-alone.

The plugin supports importing MotionBend projects: we wanted to make sure you can perform motion editing even though the motion graphs and editing tools are not present in the plugin. This way, you get the best of both worlds.

If you have any feature suggestions then please let us know. By the way, we consider that future Tiliam products will include other plugins.

MotionBend 1.6 Stand-Alone Released

The major change in version 1.6, asides from the plugin, was a new dialog to select the range of frames used when working on video from still images. For example, your video is composed of 16 bit PNG images, you open the video by selecting one of them and MotionBend automatically finds the whole sequence. Sometimes, when you are creating a timelapse for example, there can be additional photos at the beginning or end that are not part of your timelapse.

Using the Edit Stills Video menu function you can set the frame rate, anamorphic dimensions, interlacing and the range of frames that should be considered part of the video.

Editing stills

Editing stills

Some videos requiring stabilization may have static objects; e.g. a camera on a tripod observing a scene, the camera gets bumped after some time. Therefore we have made the subtitle detection feature optional. We use the term subtitle but we mean any caption or graphic that is perfectly still and onscreen for multiple frames. If you have moving graphics or subtitles shown for a short period of time, use the foreground region marking feature of MotionBend.

MotionBend preferences

MotionBend preferences


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