Canon T2i 720/60p workflow for Slow Motion in FCP Suite?

[Pete Burger]

What shutter-speed did you shoot with?
When slowing down footage with software like After Effects, Twixtor, etc. to my experience, the higher the shutter-speed of the source footage, the better the result, since those software solutions don’t deal too well with motion blur.
Another thing, that they “don’t like” are small moving objects.
Both sometimes leads to those strange warping artifacts.

hth

[Jordan Work]

Peter, (and anyone else)

Thanks for the response! I can’t believe I forgot to say…
the shutter speed was at 1/250th.

So that’s pretty fast, and at 60p I thought I’d have smooth
slow motion, should I crank the shutter higher?

Peter, (lol) I’m about 6’5″ and I was filling most of the
screen so I wouldn’t say I was a little object 🙂

Any ideas about how I can get smooth slow motion.

I mst be doing SOMETHING wrong because I have all of these at my disposal…

Canon T2i, Final Cut Pro 7, Motion 4, Cinema Tools as well as Compressor.

Is Optical Flow the best way to get slow motion out of all of these options? If so, does anyone know why I’m having trouble?

Thanks so much for anything!

– Jordan

[Pete Burger]

*lol* Yeah, 6’5″ should be big enough 😉

Problem is, software solutions are just guessing when they try to create frames that are not in the original footage.
Those warping artifacts are a result of this “guessing-method”.

When I wrote “small moving objects” then I didn’t refer to you as moving object in the first place, but to all the little details, even those in the background, shadows etc. The software doesn’t know, which part of the footage is the “essential” part (i.e. “you”), it just recognizes diffences between frames. So higher shutterspeeds create a better “contrast” between frames and makes it easier for the software to guess.

1/250 is quite high – so could be enough. Or not. 😉 The faster the motion, the higher the shutterspeed for better results.

And of course there is a limit. Slowing down 100% should be no big deal. Even 150% is possible sometimes. To my experience 200% or slower introduces artifacs. But this differs from footage to footage.

One solution might be treat background and foreground differently, so to roto the moving object (i.e. you), save the clip uncompressed with an alpha channel and slow this “foreground element” down and then comp it with a cleaned-up and slowed down (mybe just a still?) background element. Will be time consuming, but might work.

hth

[Eric Leiser]

Check this out – Canon 7d footage at 1000FPS. They use an after effects plugin called twixor, but I believe Ive seen something similar using cinema tools/motion

[Todd Terry]

Was there supposed to be a link? Or embedded video?

T2

__________________________________
Todd Terry
Creative Director
Fantastic Plastic Entertainment, Inc.
fantasticplastic.com