Frame Rates: Auto-Conforming and Slow Motion

[Blaise Douros]

That’s super rude, Dave, and not helpful at all, since it doesn’t even bother to address OP’s question. Obviously OP knows SOMETHING about framerates, or he wouldn’t have bothered to use drop-frame terminology in the first place, let alone asking the question at all. Perhaps he misremembered 119.88 as 119.98. Rather than nitpicking him on a totally irrelevant detail and ignoring the substance, you could address his (actually very intelligent) question. You don’t just say “It ought to.” Do you know? Do you have facts? Or are you just saying what should happen in your opinion? How does that possibly help Jon?

Here, watch this:

The answer, Jon, is that yes, Premiere can do what you want it to do in this case: drop a 119.88 clip on a 29.97 timeline, and Premiere defaults to a “Frame Sampling” interpolation method, which grabs every fourth frame and displays it to you when you hit play (or export). You can change it to a Frame Blending interpolation which will overlay multiple frames to create a semblance of motion blur. By the way, I noticed that you wrote 119.98 rather than .88; you may want to double check that, so you can use the correct math to slow your footage down, since 119.88 would normally be the correct number.

When you slow the clip down, whether through the Speed contextual menu, or via the Time Remapping keyframes in the Effects panel, Premiere will show as many frames as possible within the native timebase of the project. So if you slow the clip down to 25% speed, you will have one frame of footage for every frame shown on the project timecode counter. Go to 50% speed, and Premiere will show every other frame if you are Frame Sampling, or blurring every two frames together if you are Frame Blending. Go to some other rate, and Premiere will do some combination of the above.

I just tested this myself to make sure, by dropping a 59.94 clip onto a 23.976 timeline, slowing it down to different rates, and then watching the motion as I went frame by frame. This knowledge will be relevant to the way I work with offspeed footage in the future, and I’m glad you asked so I could take a moment to test this. Now we both know we can do it either way. Great question!

[Jeff Pulera]

Hi Jon,

Will just add that I just edited a Premiere CC project using 60p clips in a 30p sequence (59.94 and 29.97 to be technically correct) and when applying 50% speed, slow-motion was silky-smooth, beautiful!

Nothing special to do, it just works.

Thanks

Jeff Pulera
Safe Harbor Computers

[Blaise Douros]

Then maybe you should have at least helped with that, instead of acting like an unsalvageable sphincter. If you’ll read my reply, I demonstrated, for your benefit, how to helpfully point out the error and offer the correct framerate, as well as an explanation of why it’s important.

It’s amazing that the biggest trolls on this forum are some of the longest-standing members. It’s a situation practically unique on the internet–anywhere else, an admin would banhammer the crap out of that.

Kindness costs you nothing. You want to talk about basics, I’ve got one for you: basic human courtesy.

[Jon Shank]

Thank you for the reply and the courtesy. I have been at the brunt end of that know it all but not actually help behavior for so long that I thought I was just being dramatic so I’m glad you pointed it out. I feel much less incompetent and can use your information in many future projects.

I needed that kind of reply after a really rough night at my waiting job. Thank you Blaise and everyone else. Made my night ☺

Jon

[Ryland Chin]

You can also right click on the footage in the project panel and go to modify -> interpret footage and from there tell it what frame right you want to set it to. This is the best way to get precise slo-mo without any guess work

[Blaise Douros]

No guesswork involved, now that I’ve done some homework ☺ Premiere, it seems, is smart enough in this instance to interpret the footage correctly in the timeline when you do your desired speed changes.