professional quality speed changes?

[Shane Ross]

Twixtor is how many people do this. But that is for After Effects only. That us a very good plugin. And yes, a lot of times, especially in commercials, they shoot a high frame rate. For sports they have a lot of high end hardware to accomplish this.

Look up Time Remap in the FCP manual for how to start normal speed then slow down. If you are using FCP 6. FCP 7 has new speed controls.

Shane

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[Matt Campbell]

Thanks Shane. I will be getting After Effects, hopefully soon. I’ll look into Twixtor then. I already know how to time remap clips, I just want to get the best quality when doing so. I’ll revisit the manual again.

I’ve been getting a lot of frame interpolation (if thats the right term for that), which makes the slow-mo look steppy and not very clean. With clips that have already been shot or footage downloaded from Getty, can FCP, Motion or even Compressor make this cleaner using Optical Flow? Or will AE and Twixtor be the best way to go?

OS 10.5.5, Mac Pro 2 x 3 ghz quad-core intel xenon, 9 gb ram, with BM Intensity Pro card

[David Bogie]

[Matt Campbell] “can FCP, Motion or even Compressor make this cleaner using Optical Flow? Or will AE and Twixtor be the best way to go? “

It’s your money, of course, but I would not invest in After Effects and Tixtor merely for the 50/50 chance of obtaining stunning slow motion. You’d be far better off obtaining a camera that can shoot at higher frame rates.

Optical Flow is more or less the same procedural algorithm in use in all of the interframe creation systems; every pixels is mapped as a vector path and the software attempts to create frames where you failed to provide them; you should have been shooting 90p or even 120p instead of 60i. The results of trying to create buttery smooth slow motion from 30fps video that includes shutter speed motion blur artifacts are spotty and they depend largely on good photography to begin with.

About all you can do is experiment. Take really good notes.

bogiesan

[Matt Campbell]

Thanks David. Appreciate you shedding some techy light on this for me. We have the HVX 200 and I do over and under crank the camera for speed changes with both 24PN and 30PN and shooting at 12fps or even 60fps. My main concern is for footage from another source and apply speed changes in post. I’ll keep testing testing testing until I find a method that works and yields decent results. This is not for high end work but merely for those employee videos and web videos to showcase our agency life. Thanks for the insight. Big help.

OS 10.5.5, Mac Pro 2 x 3 ghz quad-core intel xenon, 9 gb ram, with BM Intensity Pro card

[Simon Webb]

Actually, Twixtor does, in fact, work with FCP. I’ve used it many times with impressive results. The learning curve is pretty steep, mind you.

One of the best ways of creating good slowmos from 30i footage is to use Twixtor in conjunction with RE:Vision’s other excellent plugin called Fields Kit. First, use Fields Kit to create full frames out of each 30i field, thus making the original footage both 50% slower and progressive, then using Twixtor to mess with the speed even more. Works like a charm.

Rendering is a bitch, but the result is worth it in my book.