Premiere Pro – Changing Playback speed smoothly >> Any similar features/options as FCP?

[Tim Kolb]

Your subject line says you want playback speed change to be ‘smooth’ but you’re actually seeking non-blended, simple frame duplication for speed changes?

Do you want an actual frame rate change? Interpreting the frame rate would do that.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Ju Dor]

Sorry I didn’t formulate this properly.
Film being shot usually at 12, 15 and 18fps, the scanners used will scan frame by frame to re-render a 25fps PAL file with non blended frames here and there to have fully progressive playback.

However, when tweaking those files speedwise, it appears that the export function blurs up frames here and there from the blending process. As a result, the exported videos appear nowhere near as sharp as the original, or what plays back in the premiere project window.

I guess that if Premiere had an option to disable frame blending when changing speed (FCP allows to disable the image-fusion mode), this issue would probably be solved.
The only thing is, I don’t have a mac and would rather work on Premiere.

[Ju Dor]

What I am trying to do is adjust the speed of the film to achieve correct motion of the subjects (some sections would have been shot at slower framerates, some other at faster ones).
Premiere somehow seems to create actual artifacts when doing that.

[Tim Kolb]

Do you work in animation?

Live action film is usually shot at 24 fps and with a 4% audio pich compensation, they play back at 25 fps without an issue.

So…it does sound like what you want is a simple, frame-duping system for speed changes.

You could change the framerate of the source file, but even then I would think that on a timeline with a different frame rate, you’ll likely have some blending as the math involved going from 12,15, or 18 fps to 25, then changed again…will be pretty fuzzy.

You say you don’t see any blending on the timeline, but just on export? What are your timeline settings and your export targets?

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Tim Kolb]

[Ju Dor] “Premiere somehow seems to create actual artifacts when doing that.”

Premiere creates interpolated frames so the action isn’t stuttering every time an extra frame needs to be inserted, which stops the motion.

After Effects can sometimes do more intricate frame interpolation with rendering than PPro does on the fly, but I think most users over the years have been lobbying for better blending in these kinds of circumstances, making the motion constant…

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Ju Dor]

ok
Thanks
Not animation, cine transfers.
What I am also after finding out is that the combination of crop/zoom (even 0.5% off the top) along with speed change creates those artifacts when a speed change alone doesn’t.
Maybe I should upload a sample project on dropbox for you to see.

[Ju Dor]

The weird thing is:
Even after the speed change is adjusted on my clip(if say I wanted to speed up the video in premiere), exported (without crop effect) onto a MotionJpeg avi, then re imported into premiere, which means the new video already contains the premiere speed change, the minute I add a crop effect (0.5% top crop zoom), some of the frames get then blended on screen with the next one.
If I deactivate the crop, no bother.
So strange.

The reason why I add crops is because the produced files from the telecine have a white bar on the top, as an interlacing bar, very thin, which can easily be got rid of by a crop zoom @0.5% on the top.
What the problem is, is that this seems not to go well with speed changes…

[Tim Kolb]

Do you need to crop to make the picture letterboxed? Otherwise you could just try going in the Effect Controls and scale the image up there…no crop.

TimK,
Director, Consultant
Kolb Productions,

Adobe Certified Instructor

[Ju Dor]

Tried the scale effect but it does create the same artifact.
I created a Premiere Project illustrating this:
In the project, I added a marker to compare between 3 tracks:
Track1: track with built in speed mod (+105% from original) & rendered
Track2: original video with a +105% speed adjustment added
Track3: original video with no speed adjustment added

Track1 FX: Crop top 0.5% fx (disabled)
Motion_Scale@100.5% (disabled)
If you enable either of these 2, the issue appears, even in the playback monitor (before even exporting)

Track2 FX: Crop top (disabled)
Enabling the crop fx looks fine in Premiere’s program monitor, but exporting with fx + that 105% speed change will create that frame blending issue too

Track3 FX: Crop top (disabled)
Enabling the crop fx looks fine in Premiere’s program monitor
Exporting with the fx and no speed change is fine, but then that annoying line on top of the video is still there.

If you look at the line on top of the original video (looks like an interlacing artifact although it is a blackmagic design capture file that should create 1080p), you will see why I want to crop projects on the top, as it generally gets rid of that issue. However, with speed adjustments, not all projects it seems though, frame blending appears and gives horrible artifacts.

I will upload the project in question shortly
In the meantime, here are 2 screenshots showing the issue