Lock & Load plus FCP7 = constant crashes
 

Anyone else here using the image stabilzer software from CoreMelt called "Lock & Load"? I got it because smoothcam is effectively busted in FCP 7, plus I heard it's way better. I'm having some real problems with stability whilst performing the "track Motion" stage. I have a standard quad core Mac Pro with 8gb RAM.

There's nothing to really indicate that the plug-in is responsible for FCP crashing. Try doing some routine maintenance on your system (Onyx and DiskWarrior) and see if having a refreshed and tuned-up OS makes a difference.

If you feel that based on the behavior that the plug-in is responsible then contact Core Melt and ask them for support advice.

Lock & Load no bad but after testing it I stay with smoothcam
 

The biggest mistake I did the first time I used smoothcam was to wait for the result. it took for ever and it gave me a negative vibe about the product. recently I downloaded the trial version of L&L, I've to say that I like this company and their policy, two weeks with full functionality and then it will keep working with watermark. I would like to see other people so open and serious.

Now the product. It works and it is fast but not as fast as I was hoping. May be it is my HW but it is the same HW I use for smoothcam. It is faster mostly because you can stabilize just a part of the clip not really faster per se. It's OK though.

The problem comes with rendering. You have to disable safe RT to see what happen. The alternative is to render the clip so all the time saving goes away. If you change the zoom a tiny bit you have to render again and so on. With safe RT disabled you can see the outcome but it lose many frames (so it does to me) if you don't re-render.

If you can live with that, it is a good product and no, it doesn't crash my system. I found it to be very stable.

I would have bought it immediately if it wasn't that due to these issues I gave a second chance to smoothcam and I learned to like it. It is not broken, just tell to analize the clip and forget about them. SC will automaticaly release to you all the CPU you need for your other tasks. It will halt if necessary and restart automatically. I just finished a BD with 40% of the clips in bad shape and to some digree I used smoothcam on them, at one point I had 20 clips queued for analisys, no problem. Smoothcam worked on my dead times and I didn't even know it was there. The result has be outstanding and no rendering beside the self rendering done during the lunch break.

Thanks for the responses, much appreciated (strange, my prefs to get immediate email notification didn't work?)

I got a response from Roger Bolton at CoreMelt just a few mins after posting a support question about it (turns out they are located in Oz). He mentioned that they are releasing a beta of a new version of Lock & Load that uses a different mechanism to read frames. In my testing, when it didn't crash the computer the analysis phase wasn't that much faster than SmothCam. And then I tried L&L in Motion (which isn't affected by the crashing problems) and it's a totally different story - it does the analysis of 1080x1920 in a blink of an eye. The advantage for me (aside from the fact that SmoothCam is completely broken for me in FCP7 - it seems to render progressive frames to interlaced?!?) L&L has greater control over the variables without needing to go fully manual. I agree that a cool feature of SmoothCam is that you can batch analyze footage O/N or whenever. I have other options such as Motion, Shake SmoothCam, Mokey but L&L would be great when they fix it. Also, the price is too high - $99 should probably be max.

Hey Greg,

I contacted them about a group buy / discount for our community. Roger responded within minutes! Figured I'd spread the word to help others out as well.

Use this promo code : dvmaglnl09

$20 off the product.

Merry Christmas :).

-Randy

Awesome! Thanks for the group buy info!
I am evaluating L&L and was planning on purchasing it as it works very well. I am using FCP7 on Snow Leopard with no issues. works WAY faster than smoothcam and no blurring or doubling of the image!

Yes, nice work Randy!