best way to shoot for slow mo on EX-1

[Craig Seeman]

720p24/60. Use a very high (fast) shutter speed and then use an Optical Flow filter to slow down even further.

[Sam Fulbright]

sorry to be a n00b, but where is the optical flow filter?

[Craig Seeman]

If you’re on Mac there’s one in Final Cut Studio 2- Motion 3
Twixtor is a good optical flow plugin that many people buy/recommend.

The thing is some shots can be more problematic than others because Optical Flow is trying to create new frames based on the motion present and sometimes it doesn’t get things quite right. That’s why people spend many $$$$ and special slow motion cameras like the Phantom series. They can shoot thousands of frames per second.

[Craig Seeman]

BTW the reason why I recommend the high shutter speed is that reduces blurring so it can improve the motion estimation and therefore, the creation of new frames which using Optical Flow.

Here’s Twixtor
https://www.revisionfx.com/products/twixtor/

[David Soriano]

in that link the sample vid says that shot at regular speed and then used Twixtor…did i read that right?

[Craig Seeman]

Twixtor is great. Apple Motion and Apple Compressor also use Optical Flow but there’s more tweaks in Twixtor if you want to delve that deep.

Optical Flow is not as good as shooting high speed. Too many situations result in artifacts. Fictionally computed/created frames aren’t going to be as good as actually capturing the motion at high speed. Even ReVision (Twixtor devs) have examples where you need to rotoscope to get clean frames. At that point you have to consider the post production budget and time and whether renting a high speed camera is better. Optical Flow is great when it works and when it’s a better budget choice but it’s not the same as shooting high speed.

Generally I find shooting 720p24 or 30/60 to be good but yet there are many times I’d like to shoot at higher speeds. Higher speeds mean higher data rates though and that’s why it’s expensive to implement. I wouldn’t be surprised if the next generation (or the one following that) of lower priced range cameras implement 120 to 300fps. Casio has a “cute” still camera than can also shoot very high frame rate video but at small frame sizes due to the data rate. Actually if Sony really wants to keep up the sales of SxS, such a feature would be a good way to do it.

[David Soriano]

That casio is sweet, from what i’ve seen. Good for lab experiments and foolin’ around with stuff you want to post on web.TV…not so much, from what i read.