poor slow motion quality with prores 422 HQ

[Jerry Hofmann]

Recapture the errant clips just as you did the first time. They sound like there’s a corruption in it. Can’t get much better Codec than what you’re using now BTW…
Jerry

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[Nathan Lehner]

Just to clarify. I changed the speed to slow motion (20% of the normal speed) in FCP and all of my slow motion clips are the ones that are very jumpy. . . like a half the normal frames are there. I’m shooting at 30fps so I’m not expecting super smooth slowmo but this is a lot worse than when I keep it in HDV. Would a 4444prores be better?

thanks so much.

[Kevin Monahan]

Send it to Motion and do Optical Flow Speed FX instead of FCP. 20% is not going to look great no matter what you do, though. Good luck.

Kevin Monahan
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[Zane Barker]

What type of media drive a you using? And what data speeds are you getting on it?

ProRes HQ has a vary high data rate.

Hindsight is always 1080p

[Nathan Lehner]

I’m kinda ignorant with my tech glossary. . . I’m on a 4 month old quad core imac, 2.8ghz processor, processor speed 4.8GT/s (is that data rate?), ATI Radeon HD 4850 video card.

Here is a link to my issue if you have the time: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z_nRWzBCLTY
its obvious anytime I slow the speed. . . most notably at :45 and 1:14

thanks,
nate

[Bj Ahlen]

That is frame blending, the best FCP can do.

Do the slowdown in Motion instead, it can synthesize the missing frames (a 5x slowdown is certainly challenging, but it will look better than in FCP).

And use regular Prores instead of HQ. You won’t notice any quality difference here, but you won’t have to wait as long for the render.

[Zane Barker]

“I’m on a 4 month old quad core imac”

On an iMac the fastest connection for hard drives is FireWire 800, and that is not fast enough for pro res HQ. Io recommend working in regular pro res.

Hindsight is always 1080p

[Nathan Lehner]

Thanks all for the responses,

Wow, Firewire 800 is not fast enough for 422 HQ?! I thought I was seriously down-converting my HD footage. It certainly looks better when I log and transfer in native HDV but takes up so much space.

I’ll have to start working in motion and see what that does.

Nate

[Michael Craven]

[Nathan Lehner] “It certainly looks better when I log and transfer in native HDV but takes up so much space.”

ProRes HQ would take up a lot more space than HDV would.

But I definitely concur with everyone else about doing the slowmo in Motion. Optical flow will make your slowmos look great!

[Nathan Lehner]

Thanks everyone. I guess I need get going in motion to make this more effective. I’m just surprised that HDV looks better than prores 422!? I think I need to get more informed on when to use the prores codecs and when not to.

Nate