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Advanced Frame Blending
The Situation: I am finishing my online of a 23.976 project. Exporting to AE to do color styles, down-converting, and frame rate conversion (to 29.97). But upon testing, there is a bit of a problem:
The Problem: Frame blending does not recognize cuts, and therefore tries to blend the last frame of one cut with the first frame of the following cut. And the result is not pretty: very warped and gooey. But not a yummy kind of gooey. Like an unwanted kind. So obviously this is meant for recently captured clips before the edit process.
The Question: Is there a work around for this (besides exporting and converting each clip separately)? Or is there a way to set a threshold for frame blending so it will only blend if a certain amount of the color information has changed? Applying this conversion to source clips will not work, since it’ll throw my 23.967 timeline all out of wack.
Thank you in advance for your help.
Mike Browning
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8 Replies
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I think I may be a little confused. You’re trying to go from a 23.976 source to a 29.97 output? Is there a reason you don’t want to use the time honored 3:2 Pulldown to go to 29.97? Or better yet, stick to digital delivery and render out a 23.976 file?
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
I have been and am at this point. I was trying this particular preset out since it creates new frames instead of repeating them. Then I ran into the frame blending road block. But the frame rate and the preset is irrelevant to the question, so I reckon I shouldn’t have added those details. Thank you for the timely reply, though.
The real question that arose was about frame blending. So disregard the frame rate in this question. Are there any work arounds to frame blending edited sequences?
I’ve run into this before with a slow motion sequence. It was no problem to get around, because it was comprised of only a few clips that I could easily divide up in AE. But say, for instance, you have a 60 second, fast-paced timeline with lots of edits and you want to add AE’s advanced frame blending to smooth out the motion. Are there any options or expressions or ways to control this feature so you don’t get the crazy warps in between edits? Or am I wasting my time? I understand fully that you can re-render the source video, but let’s say for whatever reason you don’t want to do that.
Thanks
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unless timewarp (i believe that’s what andrew used, correct?) has a scene change or cut detection setting, i’m not sure how you could get the plugin to recognize when a cut happens. you may be able to use an expression to look at layer markers to alter the way it handles the frame interpolation (none, frame mix, pixel motion), but you would still have to set the layer markers by hand, and at that point splitting the layer would be just as easy.
i would have two suggestions if you do this again… if you have all the footage prior to the edit, use andrew’s frc method to convert all the footage first, then edit. even better would be, if you like the progressive frame look and you shoot your own footage and the destination is 29.97 fps, shoot it all at 29.97 progressive (many cameras can do this), or even deinterlace 29.97 to create progressive frames prior to editing (ae can do this, but you may want to look into a better deinterlacer than ae’s, one like revision’s fields kit).
Kevin Camp
Senior Designer
KCPQ, KMYQ & KRCW -
[Kevin Camp] “unless timewarp (i believe that’s what andrew used, correct?) has a scene change or cut detection setting”
I believe Timewarp does have a scene detect option, and I believe it’s hit and miss as well as being very slow.
I agree with everything Kevin said. In addition, if you could expand a little more on why you’re doing this then we might be able to give more specific advice.
Darby Edelen
Lead Designer
Left Coast Digital
Santa Cruz, CA -
Here’s a link to a cut detector that does a reasonably good job.
https://aescripts.com/2008/01/18/magnum-the-edit-detector/
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Beautiful, thank you Joey. I will have to try this script out for a future project. It looks very promising
And like I said, the frame rate and plug-in is irrelevant to the question, it was just to explain where I got the question from. I was testing out a plug-in that uses pixel motion frame interpolation (sorry if I confused you by calling it frame blending – I have been corrected). I just had questions about getting around the crazy warps at the edit points in a sequence. Thank you for your replies.
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Hey Joey,
I am curious to know if you’ve run into situations where Magnum has not done a good job? I am always looking to improve it, so i would love to hear about situations in which it has a hard time.
-Lloyd
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May be a little late for you, but for those who follow, I ran across this problem myself and after searching the internet to no avail, finally figured out a solution. First split the layer at each of your edit points, then precompose each of those new layers. Then it will stop trying to frame blend across the edit. Just splitting the layers without precomposing them is not enough. Kind of a PITA, but it works.
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Nope, never mind. It worked on a test clip, but must have been a fluke. Still would like a solution as well.
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