I Have a Tech Related Query

As many of you know, I've been logging (tagging) footage like there's no tomorrow since importing the last tape from our 64 days on the road. One of the things that was always in the back of my mind while filming, specifically while filming Larry bicycling, or point-of-view shots (while moving), was framing the shot and moving the camera in a way that could later be smoothed out in post. Luckily, one of Final Cut Pro's newest features is SmoothCam, which pulls from Shake's motion-tracking and stabilizing technology. In casual-speak: it's the best filter ever.


... from mike ambs on Vimeo. The above is a short video I threw together of Mike Hedge and I on our way to SXSW - most of it is walking shots with the SmoothCam filter applied, just to give you an example of what I'm talking about.


Where was I...

But, the time it takes Final Cut to analyze a clip is amazingly long. For example, I had a 3 minute long video clip I wanted to smooth out the other day, it took FCP over two hours to do it's thing. True, I had several other big apps open, and was busy flying through footage with Quicklook, but, it wouldn't have been much different considering that. What I'm getting at is: so far - and I still have almost 900 video clips left to log - I have about 360 flips tagged with "moving shot". And in the next few days, I plan on dragging all those files (plus whatever else gets tagged with that by the time I'm done) into Final Cut and dropping SmoothCam on *all* the clips at once.

Assuming my MacBook Pro doesn't blow up in my face, it's going to take weeks for it to analyze all several hundred files: which range from 30 seconds to 45 minutes in length. The filter is smart enough to share Final Cut's resources, and I'm still able to edit while it works in the background. But even so, weeks and weeks of constant SmoothCam analyses is going to take it's toll on my laptop's memory.

A few months ago, I bought iFreeMemory, which has helped avoid many restarts to speed up my computer after doing too many things at once. But the app doesn't have an auto-pilot mode, I have to manually click it, and hit "optimize" every time I want to dump the lagged memory and speed things up again.

So, after all this rambling, my question is: does anyone know, or have any ideas, on how I can set up my computer to every hour, or two hours, refresh it's memory all on it's own? Either with iFreeMemory or another app? Basically I plan on leaving Final Cut open the next 5 months no matter what I'm doing and I'd like to be sure my computer is working as fast as it can, and not getting bogged down with time.


On a side note: I *do* plan on running through the "moving shot" videos and weeding out the ones I know I'll never use. Sadly though, you can't *really* tell how well the SmoothCam is going to work until after it's done analyzing, so I'll still have to run the filter on most of them.

On another side note: I realize for longer video files, it's recommended to re-export just the section you want to use, and *then* run SmoothCam on that new clip. But 99% of the time, if I have a 45 minutes long clip, it's all one big long continuous shot of Larry bicycling that we took with the 25 foot crane on the top of the van moving along at 20 miles an hour... so... it's very hard for me to pick what works best until I see it smoothed out :P

End of side notes. Thanks for your help!