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Adjusting Clip Speed Causes Weird Slow Motion Effect
I would like to use a smooth slow-motion effect on a few clips. I have adjusted the clip speeds to 50%. Instead of the smooth effect I am getting more of a jerky uneven motion.
The first time I tried the effect my clips slowed down but had a shadow and ghost-like effect to them. The best way I can describe this is the clips looked like they were from Star Trek the Motion Picture when the ship was about to go into warp speed and the crew members moved slowly across the bridge with a resisdual almost ghost effect of themselves.
The next time I tried this effect I unchecked frame blending, and now the clips appear slower but still have a jerky look to them.
How can I make these clips flow smoothly and slowly without the jerkyness?
Thanks
Howie -
7 Replies
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What you are seeing is exactly what Frame Blending is supposed to do. There’s a tradeoff between temporal smoothness and picture sharpness when it comes to making slow-mos. As far as FCP’s native tools are concerned, you can’t really have both at the same time.
If you have the budget, however, you can use 3rd party plugins that use “Optical Flow”, interframe interpolation of slow-mo’ed clips. The plugins of choice for doing this are Re:Vision Effects Twixtor, Boris Continuum’s “BCC Optical Flow” plugin, and RealViz/Digital Anarchy’s “ReTimer” plugin.
These plugins require hardcore CPU time (as well as a significant learning curve), but they can yield amazing results that can make your footage look like it was shot on high-speed film.
Aloha,
mel -
Howie,
It ain’t cool to cross-post. (you also posted this at http://www.kenstone.net) You waste people’s time.
aren -
Hey Mel,
Between Twixtor and ReTimer, which do you prefer? We’ve downloaded a demo of each for our FCP box but alas I’m stuck down here on the Avid for the next few days and I can’t try them out. Any major pros/cons you’ve seen between the 2?
-Todd Beabout
Vazda Studios -
You could have also posted it to apple.com and to DV and ten other FCP sites.
KNow anyone in your neighborhood with After Effects? The speed change algorithm in AE is great, produces lovely effects even from DV.
The optical characteristics of Apple’s rendering engine are said to have been “gweatly impwoved” in FCP5. We’ll have to wait to see.
bogiesan
This is my standard sigfile so do not take it personally: “For crying out loud, read the freakin’ manual.”
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Hey bogiesan
Thanks for your feedback. I don’t know anyone with AE
Howie
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Aloha Mel
Thanks for responding to my post. I’ll look into the plug-ins.
Howie
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I’ve seen Avid Xpress DV do a really nice job of 50%ing a clip by running the ‘interpolate’ type option instead of standard frame-blending.
It helps also to shoot the original clip with a correspondingly shorter shutter speed (eg. halve the shutter speed if your going for a x2 slow down) if your camera can do this, to control motion blur.
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