Quick Tipp: Extract and hold a single frame

[Sam Krauser]

Love it!…Much better than the retiming tool.

[Simon Ubsdell]

Actually was experimenting with the Hold function earlier and haven’t found it buggy – I actually thought it was a really neat concept that saves a lot of keystrokes. It worked for me both with a single frame and with a range. Either go to the frame you want and press Shift/H which gives you a one hit result that you can then modify the duration of, or use the ranges selector to set the range of the hold and again Shift/H.

What were the issues you were finding?

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Stefan Buhrmester]

The retiming tool simply lies to you. Parts that say 100% speed might play slower, some parts play slightly faster. Without you ever knowing.

You can test it for yourself: Press shift+h. You’ll find that the part after the hold is played at about 70% speed even though it sais 100% and you can’t do anything about it. For example, press shift+h just 2 frames bevor the end of the clip. Instead of holding the second last frame for two seconds followed by 1 frame, it inserts multiple frames at the end.

Also, there is no way to accurately adjust the timing via the keyboard. I can’t use “change duration” on ranges, which is unfortunate.

hth

[Simon Ubsdell]

[Stefan Buhrmester] “You can test it for yourself”

Sorry, yes you’re right – I just tested it with a movie of some timecode and what it does is to hold the freeze frame for an extra two frames once it comes out of the Hold. Bad! But once you know that’s what it does I suppose you can take account of it. It doesn’t get the speed wrong as you suggest which is at least a good thing!

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Stefan Buhrmester]

[Simon Ubsdell] “It doesn’t get the speed wrong as you suggest”

Are you sure about that? My footage after the hold is played at a slower rate, although it displays “100%” in the retiming bar.

[Simon Ubsdell]

Yeah, absolutely sure.

I made a 4 second clip that consisted of a timecode generator running at 25fps and brought that in. I made a Hold at 2 seconds, then put a copy of the same clip above it so I could compare what was happening with the burnt in timecode and that’s definitely what I got. The Hold clip was running at a full 100% (according to the BITC) but just with those rogue 2 frames after the freeze.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Stefan Buhrmester]

I cannot confirm your results.

I created a 30fps timecode clip. Without retiming, everything is ok. 3 second mark in project shows 3 second mark in clip

Now I added a hold frame at the 4 second mark. And the timing get’s f**ked up. Even before the actual hold.

Maybe it depends on the footage. Anyway, I conclude that the retiming tools should NOT be used for real-world editing.

[Simon Ubsdell]

I ran the same test again – and got a different result this time!!!! So you’re absolutely right and yes, this time it messed up before the hold as well as after. So use with extreme caution but preferably not at all, thanks for the heads-up on this one.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com

[Simon Ubsdell]

I think from my tests that what we’ve got happening with this behaviour is an Ease In/Ease Out on either side of the Hold which is entirely reasonable as a default. But of course you want to be able to change it to something else.

What we really need is full control of all keyframe parameters on all automation of any kind, preferably with a nice large automation edit window. It’s all very basic at the moment, though I’m sure it will come.

Simon Ubsdell
Director/Editor/Writer
http://www.tokyo-uk.com