CoreMelt recently released their new motion stabalization plugin for Final Cut Pro called Lock & Load. With the release they put out the pretty bold statement of having "the worlds fastest stabilizer for Final Cut Pro, running at 6 times the speed of Apple's inbuilt stabilizer; Smoothcam." Let's see what all the fuss is about then, shall we?

User interface and features
Lock & Load has a pretty straight forward UI which reminds of most FCP plug-ins out there. The work-flow is also very similar to that of SmootCam which comes bundled with Final Cut Pro.

1. Load a clip from the timeline in the viewer
2. Analyze tracking data
3. Grab a coffee, the above takes time
4. Adjust the stabilization after your liking
5. Render the clip as any other asset with filters on them in your timeline[/indent]
The above is very straight forward and not much to talk about really.

Impressions
With a very similar work-flow to SmoothCam, Lock & Load is easy to get used to. The speed gains CoreMelt claims aren't a joke either.

On a 36 second HD clip I saw the following:
- Analyze the clip took 2 minutes for Lock & Load where SmoothCam needed over 8 minutes
- Rendering the clip took 84 seconds for Lock & Load instead of the 120 seconds SmoothCam needed

That's a boost of around 450% in analyzing footage and 40% in rendering speed. Impressive start!

Looking at a 1 second subclip of a 20 second SD file I saw the following:
- Analyze the clip took 2 seconds for Lock & Load where SmoothCam needed almost 2 minutes
- Rendering the clip took 2 seconds for Lock & Load instead of the 3 seconds SmoothCam needed

Looking at the above, the analyze phase when dealing with subclips is vastly much faster with Lock & Load, given it will vary a lot depending on how you set up your work.

Lock & Load also offers a lot more options for better stabilization than what's built into Final Cut Pro. A few of these include:

- The option of choosing different stabilization modes for different types of shots. This shined on my SD clip.
- The option of how much you want to stabilize your clip. SmoothCam has a very similar setting. You however have more control here as well as the ability to key-frame a lot of the plug-ins settings. The later is a huge limitation of SmoothCam.
- The ability to stabilize a file with multiple edit-points or scene-changes.
- The ability to only analyze the area used of a given clip in the timeline. A huge time-saver as seen on my second test.

CoreMelt does taunt the fact that the user doesn't have to do any manual tracking. This is in general very good, however some shots can be confusing for an automated tracker and it would have been nice with an "advanced" option to aid the tracker on it's way.

The grass isn't only greener
Something less impressive in Lock & Load sadly is the realtime playback. A clip that's been analyzed by SmoothCam plays back in realtime, given at a lower resolution, even at HD resolution. Still it's very easy to judge the quality of the stabilization from this. Lock & Load however had a very hard time doing this in HD. On the SD test things where fine however. Still quite odd seing it renders faster.

The above QuickLook was done on our studio system with the following spec:

- MacPro 8-core 2.8Ghz
- 16GB RAM
- 8 Disk eSATA Raid-5 Array
- Radeon 4870 512MB GPU
- Kona 3 Videocard
- MacOSX 10.5.7 and Final Cut Pro 6.04

The HD testfile was an 8-bit Uncompressed 1080i50 QuickTime file where the SD file was a 10-bit Uncompressed 576i50 QuickTime file.

I think for people doing a healthy amount of stabalization in their work should take a closer look at Lcok & Load for sure. The price-tag of 149 dollars is also reasonable (they currently have a 129 dollar introduction offer).

Links
CoreMelt